Issue: Dozens of terror suspects on federal watch lists were allowed to buy firearms legally in the United States last year, according to a Congressional investigatory report. Suspected members of terrorist groups are not automatically barred from legally buying a gun, and the investigation, conducted by the Government Accountability Office, found that individuals with clear links to terrorist groups had regularly taken advantage of this gap. F.B.I. officials maintain that they are hamstrung by laws and policies restricting the use of gun-buying records because of concerns over the privacy rights of gun owners.

AHSA believes the FBI should be given reasonable access to National Instant Check System (NICS) purchase records to insure terrorists and other prohibited individuals do not have access to firearms.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, law enforcement officials and gun control groups have voiced increasing concern about the prospect of a terrorist walking into a gun shop, legally buying an assault rifle or other type of weapon and using it in an attack.

The G.A.O. study is the first full-scale examination of the possible dangers posed by gaps in federal gun laws. Congressional officials conclude that the Federal Bureau of Investigation "could better manage" its gun-buying records in matching them against lists of suspected terrorists.

At least 44 times from February 2004 to June, people whom the F.B.I. regards as known or suspected members of terrorist groups sought permission to buy or carry a gun, the investigation found.

In all but nine cases, the F.B.I. or state authorities who handled the requests allowed the applications to proceed because a check of the would-be buyer found no automatic disqualification like being a felon, an illegal immigrant or someone deemed "mentally defective," the report found.

In the four months after the formal study ended, the authorities received an additional 14 gun applications from terror suspects, and all but 2 of those were cleared to proceed, the investigation found. In all, officials approved 47 of 58 gun applications from terror suspects over a nine-month period last year.

Some gun buyers came up as positive matches on classified internal F.B.I. watch lists that includes thousands of terrorist suspects, many of whom are being monitored, trailed or sought for questioning as part of terrorism investigations into Islamic-based, militia-style groups. The G.A.O. investigators were not given access to the identities of the gun buyers because of those criminal investigations.

Some gun rights organizations and some members of Congress have fought successfully to limit the use of the F.B.I.'s national gun-buying database as a tool for law enforcement investigators, by maintaining that the database would amount to an illegal national registry of gun owners.

The legal debate over how gun records are used became particularly contentious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, when it was disclosed that the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft had blocked the F.B.I. from using gun transfer records to match against some 1,200 suspects who were detained as part of the Sept. 11 investigation. Mr. Ashcroft maintained that using the records in a criminal investigation would violate the privacy provisions of the federal law that created the NICS system. Justice Department lawyers, however who reviewed the issue said they saw no such prohibition.

In February 2004, the Justice Department changed its policy to allow the F.B.I. to do more crosschecking between gun transfer records and terrorist intelligence.

Under the new policy, millions of instant background check applications are run against the F.B.I.'s internal terrorist watch list, and if there is a match, bureau field agents or other counterterrorism personnel are to be contacted to determine whether they have any information about the terror suspect.

In some cases, the extra review allowed the F.B.I. to block a gun purchase by a suspected terrorist that might otherwise have proceeded because of the lag time to input the information into the database.

The F.B.I. has announced that it is forming a study group to review gun sales to terror suspects.