Requests against that information can take hours to process. There are over a thousand requests a day.
As a federal job-creation program, congratulations I guess, but what a waste of human time.
https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-database...
[1] ... technically, the data is, in fact, digitally stored so that an electronic equivalent of microfiche-scanning can be used to find information. That scanning is still done by hand because of the 1986 law banning registry creation.
In the same sense that there is no human right to not have it discovered that a car that ran someone over is registered to a particular person, or that a plane that crashes into a neighborhood was scheduled to fly under a particular flight-plan and be operated by a particular pilot.
In general, society (American society included) assigns additional responsibilities of care and auditing to ownership and operation of machines and equipment with a high probability of causing the death of a third party if they are mis-used.
If you are implying that a lack of a functioning Form 4473 index protects the right to bear arms... I'm not sure I agree with that. If the federal government really got a bug up it's butt about banning private firearm ownership, they wouldn't need a Form 4473 index. They would just need to ban the manufacture and import of new firearms and/or ammunition, and let the now-grandfathered old weapons trickle out of the market - no need for a gun grab.
This is how they banned fully-automatic weapons, after all. You can technically still buy them, but the cost of a grandfathered automatic weapon is so astronomical that you would never dream of actually firing it.
Edit: the National Tracing Center is currently so burdened with paper copies that their floor is literally collapsing[2].
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2013/05/20/185530763/the-low-tech-way-gu...
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/02/us/politics/atf-nra-guns....