Congress Banned a Gun Registry; AI Inference May Render the Prohibition Obsolete

Publication Date

May 2026

Abstract

Federal law prohibits the establishment of “any system of registration of firearms, firearms owners, or firearms transactions” under 18 U.S.C. § 926(a). The existing debate over that prohibition has focused on whether ATF’s digitization of out-of-business dealer records violates § 926(a). This paper argues that the debate, as framed today, overlooks a more consequential question: whether modern Artificial Intelligence (AI) inference capabilities could derive registry-equivalent knowledge from lawfully held federal data without the construction of a formal registry at all; and whether a current administration policy directive calling for the ingestion of “all government data” into AI models puts that possibility on a collision course with the statute.

Drawing on Professor Daniel Solove’s framework treating AI-generated inferences as functionally equivalent to collected data, Professor Orin Kerr’s mosaic theory of aggregated surveillance, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carpenter v. United States (2018), and the chilling-effect jurisprudence in Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965) and NAACP v. Alabama (1958), this paper contends that § 926(a)’s prohibition was not designed to address the inferential capabilities that machine learning now enables. The paper examines the shift in federal AI governance from the Biden administration’s risk-evaluation framework to the current administration’s push to accelerate AI deployment, finding that neither approach has engaged with the specific legal tension between broad data ingestion and the firearms registry prohibition.

Key legal issues raised in this paper include the interpretation of § 926(a) given emerging AI inference capabilities; the effect of the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) on future challenges to ATF’s data practices; the lack of AI-specific governance at ATF regardless of administration; and the potential chilling effect on Second Amendment rights that is posed by the growing capacity to infer firearms ownership utilizing AI. A review of the existing literature on these subjects identified no law review article, policy paper, or legal brief addressing this intersection directly. This paper seeks to fill that gap.

Recommended Citation

Del Schlangen, Congress Banned a Gun Registry; AI Inference May Render the Prohibition Obsolete (Firearms Rsch. Ctr., Working Paper No. 2026-5).

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