Here is the reality of gun tracing: if police recover a gun at a crime scene, they find out pretty quickly which distributor sold it to which FFL. Finding out who bought it from that FFL will take some time (from hours to weeks), because an agent will have to sit down at that dealer and manually page through 4473s and/or the bound book.
I know that on TV, police can recover a slug and within 15 minutes have a "trace" on to whom the gun was "registered", even though 47 states have no registration. That's tell-a-vision, aka fiction.
Most of the time, tracing is tedious and a waste of time, and dead-ends at the first dealer to sell the gun.
Kevin
Selling My 9mm
Moderator: carlson1
To answer the original question, if you're not an FFL and you don't buy and sell firearms as a business, then you are not required to keep records of any personal firearms you sell. You should ask to see a Texas driver's license before you sell a firearm just to make certain that the buyer also lives in Texas and you're not violating the 1968 Gun Control Act, but you're not required to keep any records. Dealers might do so to protect their licenses, but you don't need to.
"Never send a man where you can send a bullet." - Winston Churchill in A Roving Commission