National Tracing Center

The National Tracing Center (NTC) of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is the sole firearms tracing facility in the United States. It provides information to provide foreign (international), federal, state and local law enforcement agencies with suspects for firearm crime investigations, detect suspected firearms traffickers, and track the intrastate, interstate and international movement of firearms. Congressional restrictions are in place to prevent the release of firearms trace information to anyone other than law enforcement agencies, however, this restriction does not apply to participating foreign countries or agencies. The only restriction is by Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed by the agency receiving ATF's eTrace software.

The NTC is located on a 10-acre (40,000 m²) secure site in Martinsburg, West Virginia. This facility also houses ATF's Violent Crime Analysis Branch, Firearms Technology Branch, Firearms Testing Range, Brady Operations Branch, ATF's Gun Vault Collection, the Federal Explosives Licensing Center, Imports Branch, NFA Branch, and the Federal Firearms Licensing Center.

Firearms tracing is the systematic tracking of the movement of a firearms recovered by law enforcement officials from the first sale by the manufacturer or importer through the distribution chain (wholesaler/retailer) to the first retail purchaser. Comprehensive firearms tracing is the routine tracing of every gun recovered within a geographic area or specific law enforcement jurisdiction. The ATF computer system used for firearms tracing is eTrace.

eTrace is an ATF computer system which provides on-line trace submission through the internet, and provides the utilities for submitting, retrieving, storing, and querying all firearms trace related information relative to the requestor’s agency. Distribution of eTrace to law enforcement began in January 2005. As of February, 2015, more than 5,600 U.S. law enforcement agencies and 41 foreign countries use eTrace. More than 360,000 trace requests were processed in fiscal year 2014. In December 2009, ATF released a bilingual version (eTrace 4.0) of eTrace allowing firearm traces in Spanish or English which has been deployed in Guatemala, Costa Rica and throughout Mexico. Recently, according to a 2016 GAO report, in 2013, Mexico restricted eTrace access solely to the Mexican Attorney General Office.

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