When Jim Pruett's Guns & Ammo went out of business this summer, the owner surrendered to the federal government thousands of records related to every gun the shop had sold: sales logs and six-page forms, required by law, that contain information such as the purchaser's name, age, race, residence and type of firearm.

After four years in business, Pruett said there were enough boxes to load the cargo bay of a sport utility vehicle. The last time Pruett closed a gun shop, after a decade, he turned over enough records to fill two pickup truck beds.

"It is a nightmare that you have to start and keep together," Pruett said. "The gun business is a paper-intensive deal."

The records are required to be kept by federally licensed firearms dealers until they close their doors. They are seen as containing potentially vital information should the guns ever be used in a crime.

Pruett's batch of papers flowed into a sea of more than 600 million records that are stored in a purposefully inefficient manner at the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive's "Out of Business Records Center" in West Virginia.

Database forbidden

It is antiquated by 2015 standards, but the agency says it complies with federal laws that they not be consolidated into a database.

The government is forbidden by law from having any sort of database that could quickly be searched to identify who has purchased rifles and handguns.

The National Rifle Association has successfully fought against any legislative efforts to change the current system.

Alice Tripp, spokeswoman for the Texas State Rifle Association, said the right to own firearms goes all the way back in U.S. history and people are touchy about the government tracking them.

"Firearms are the only manufactured product protected by the Constitution," she said. "You have no right to a car, house, job or television set. It was a way to feed yourself, a way to protect yourself. Just because you live in a house and turn on a faucet and water comes out, or you dial 911 doesn't mean you won't have to be your own first responder."

She also said firearms owners want the government to be able to have the tools it needs to do its jobs.

Records are kept in stacks until they are processed - made more suitable for reading - by scanning them one by one into digital images that can be searched only one by one. The records are forbidden from being reviewed via character recognition software.

That means a request to trace a weapon takes time.

"We literally have people sitting at a scanner that scan through all those records until they find that one needle in a haystack," said Ginger Colbrun, chief spokeswoman for the ATF in Washington. "If you go in there," she said of the ATF warehouse, "you will literally see boxes and boxes stacked against the walls."

Five or six days

The agency gets about 1.2 million records each month. Last year, the agency handled more than 340,000 requests for a weapons trace, including about 119,000 instances of out-of-business firearms records.

Urgent requests can be handled in less than 24 hours; however, those classified as routine can take five or six days, according to the agency.

The system is kept antiquated, Colbrun said, to ensure the agency complies with federal laws that it not create any kind of a database.

"We can't possibly store all these records, so we have to take a screen snap (photo)," she said, noting that documents and the sales records related to the ATF Form 4473, as the six-page document is known, have been turned in on everything from computer files, to spiral notebooks, to one out-of-business dealer who supposedly kept his sales log on toilet paper to make a defiant point.

Colbrun said the records can yield important clues when firearms are used in crimes, but the process is painstakingly long in the Internet era.

Tracing it back

For example, if a gun is used in a murder, the serial number is traced by the ATF back to the manufacturer, who can then refer agents to a regional distributor, who in turn can say which gun store sold the weapon to the public.

At the gun store, agents can go through the forms to see who bought it. From there, it is a phone call or knock at a door.

"It is good old-fashioned police work," Colbrun said. "Sometimes you will trace it back to John Smith, and you show up at John Smith's house and he says, 'I bought that gun 10 years ago and give it to my brother-in-law, or it was lost or stolen."

As for Pruett, he said keeping the records was a hassle and could open the door for government abuse, but he understood why it was needed.

"I hope we trust the government to some degree," he said.