Thinking of Buying a Suppressor? Form 4 Wait Times are Down…WAY Down

If you go to the ATF web site to see how long it’s currently taking them to process a Form 4, this is what you’ll see (at least as of today):

If you’re not a buyer of NFA-regulated items like suppressors, you may think, ‘Huh, under three months isn’t too bad.’ But we’d heard that the numbers ATF is publishing don’t really reflect reality. In fact, they’re processing Form 4s faster than that these days. Much faster, in fact.

Wanting to find out what’s really going on, we talked to a couple of people who would know…Knox Williams and Owen Miller at the American Suppressor Association. What they told us was, well, jaw-dropping. They’d gotten anecdotal reports of eForm processing times measured in days and a couple of weeks. They’ve confirmed this not only with ATF, but with retailers as well.

They told me they’d heard of a couple of instances of eFilers who’d completed the process at a gun store, ran errands for a couple of hours, and gotten home to find that their Form 4 had already been approved.

If you want more proof of what’s happening in the real world, check out Silencer Shop’s continually updated wait time tracking results.

Yes, you read that right. The processor of more Form 4s than anyone else in the country is seeing an average processing time of three days for individual eForm 4 filings.

We’ll wait while you let that sink in.

For those of you who aren’t familiar, suppressors (AKA, silencers) are regulated under the National Firearms Act. That means you can’t just walk into a gun store and buy one, even with a background check, as you would a pistol, rifle, or shotgun.

Instead, you have to fill out some paperwork, pay greedy Uncle Sam a $200 tax, and wait for them to run a background check, dot the bureaucratic i’s, cross the regulatory t’s and then, finally, give you permission to pick up the suppressor you’ve already paid for from your local retailer.

Yes, that’s a pain in the posterior. Not only do a lot of people decide they don’t want to shell out $200 on top of the price of the can they want, but they also really don’t want to wait six months or more for ATF to grant them permission.

If you’ve shot guns with suppressors, you know it’s very much worth the wait and the added expense. Still, having to wait months for permission on top of bleeding you for a couple of Benjamins — for each can you buy — is adding insult to injury. That’s why these latest reduced processing times, more accurately measured in days rather than months, are a very big deal.

The ATF eForm system was first abortively rolled out over a decade ago, then pulled after burping, barfing, and farting so badly it was obvious to all that it just couldn’t do what it was supposed to do. It was built, after all, by the finest technology minds the government could muster. ATF eForms was the ObamaCare HealthCare.gov the firearm regulatory world.

That, however, was then and this is now. With all of the speed and agility you’d expect from an executive branch three-letter regulatory agency, ATF re-launched eForms in December of 2021. It had some initial bumps and bugs, but those were ironed out over time and now, finally, the system now works.

The natural question then is…why? What happened in the last few months? Why does ATF suddenly have its act together? To what do we owe this good news?

As it turns out, those questions have a lot of answers.

First we wondered if the volume of eForm 4s had dropped. The ASA tells us that Form 4 volume was down about seven percent last year, probably attributable to an iffy economy and higher inflation (thanks, Brandon). But volume is rebounding this year. The February, 2024 eForm 4 volume jumped 84% over the January numbers.

Then we wondered if ATF had hired more government functionaries to handle the processing. We hear that, in fact, they have, but the number isn’t huge. More hands certainly help, but that’s not the biggest reason for all the improvement.

The real story here, according to Knox and Owen is, as they told us, ATF has finally “gotten out of its own way.” In practical terms, that means they’ve improved their software and their processes, including…finally…bundling applications.

ATF used to process all Form 4s on a first in, first out basis. Over 70 percent of applications fly through the system with no red flags or delays. The problem was, those with issues that came in before the easily approved Form 4s delayed the entire process. The typos and other hangups held up the entire system.

That’s no longer the case. FIFO is no longer the processing protocol, so easy, quickly approved applications can sail through the system.

Another “feature” of past processing meant that if someone submitted two or three Form 4s wanting to buy two or three cans, each one was processed separately. Each one required its own background check and each one could very well have been processed by different people at ATF’s NFA division.

Now ATF is starting to bundle those. So no matter how many NFA items you may be buying, ATF is starting to combine them for one background check that’s processed by a single NFA division person.

We hear ATF bundling is still a work in progress as ATF updates its processes to more fully build that functionality into their systems. Not everyone who submits multiple Form 4s will have their paperwork bundled right now, but it’s happening more often.

This has drastically cut down on the overall volume of Form 4s ATF has to process. And now ATF has started doing the same thing with trusts. They expect to make the same kind of progress with trusts as they have with individual eForm 4 times, working toward getting the trust processing wait time down to an average of 30 days or less.

Finally, now that the eForms system is working, about 96% of the Form 4s ATF gets come in electronically. That means the information doesn’t have to be read by a processor, keyed into ATF’s system (a slow process) and potentially held up because of data entry errors.

All of this has been the result of a lot of work on the part of the industry and ASA. Some of the change was prompted by pointed questions about processing times — which hadn’t improved in about a decade — aimed at ATF Director Steve Dettelbach by members of the House Commerce, Justice and Science subcommittee last year.

ASA also convened an industry roundtable with NFA division officials at the end of last year where, among other things, ATF finally acknowledged that there’s no regulatory statute that prohibits them from bundling Form 4s for processing.

All of that hard work on the part of suppressor makers and the ASA has directly resulted in the streamlined processing at ATF and the drastically reduced processing times we’re now seeing. Also, in a March 15 webinar with the NFA division, ATF declared that the improvements they’ve made now constitute the “new normal” and wait times in days (and sometimes even hours) are what can be expected going forward.

That’s a huge win for the industry and should result in more people deciding that they’re willing to take the plunge and buy that first (or next) suppressor. That’s good for business, good for gun owners, and good for everyone’s ears.

Here’s hoping the new normal really is.