ATF eForm 4 - NFA Wait Times
Everyone is familiar with the lag in time from purchasing your silencer to when you can bring your silencer home. This year wait times has ranged from 10 months to over 1 year. It's frustrating for everyone involved, including the ATF. In this digital age of instant gratification, we are mailing (yes mailing) paper applications to a PO Box where it sits until a person can open it, take the check out and file it for processing. Once the check clears, they then go in the queue. This queue according to the ATF is roughly 124K applications annually (see here). Also the ATF states that it takes almost 4 hours to process one form. They want electronic filing as bad as we do.
That brings me to the good news!
ATF is in the coding process to relaunch electronic Form 4's. Yes!!! This says they will definitely be launching it in 2019. Now when is still up in the air. It could be August, it could be November.
Why am I so excited?
Three reasons:
I know it will work, because we already can file Form 1's (the form to apply for a Short Barreled Rifle) and have gotten those back in 3 weeks. By the way, this means you can buy a SBR or have us convert your gun to an SBR and have your stamp to take her home in 3 weeks.
Silencer manufacturers are gearing up. Industry-wide, they have been building up their volume of product to sell, because it going to be Katie Bar the Door when it hits. A word of warning though...once this hits, it's not the ATF you're going to be waiting on but the manufacturers. Production is not going to keep up with demand. I'd buy now and wait for the eForm.
I said "relaunch" the Form 4. There was an eForm 4 and it had some problems, plus 41F came along and changed how background checks were done and some other things. You can read more about that here.
If you want details on the process and how First Coast Firearms full service Silencer and SBR applications work click here.
UPDATE: 7/11/19
I just saw this note on an article published by AmmoLand here.
" eForms – Wednesday outages are continuing to allow for bug fixes and other maintenance. ATF is working on getting the IT system to the cloud, which will resolve many of the glitches with eForms. For example, the forms will be enhanced to eliminate line-item limitations. ATF hopes to have a time estimate for cloud implementation at the 18th Annual Import/Export Conference."
This conference is July 30 - Aug 1, 2019.
