If you’ve ever tried buying a suppressor, you’ll know that it used to be a pain. To buy what’s essentially a cool-looking hearing protector, you need to fill out a special ATF form, pay a $200 tax stamp to satisfy FDR’s NFA requirement, then wait months on end for the ATF to approve your form.
The first two steps might be reasonable, even if not exactly in line with the 2nd Amendment. Having to fill out and file a form seems like a reasonable way to make sure that criminals and people on terror watch lists don’t get their hands on suppressors, and if paying a relatively small tax is what it takes to keep the approval process humming along then fine.
But that third part has made it a pain to buy a suppressor; while theoretically all the ATF need do is look over a form and stamp it, that somehow tends to take them months on end.
Well, for whatever reason that major problem might have been alleviated, as ZeroHedge reports:
The ATF recently allowed Form 4s or “Application for Tax Paid Transfer and Registration of Firearm” to be submitted via eForms to reduce the time it takes for a law-abiding citizen to obtain a suppressor for a gun. Anyone who has bought a suppressor over the years has painfully understood it takes the ATF a mindnumbing 6 to 9 months for approval until now.
According to the Firearm Blog, citing Silencer Shop, a company specializing in suppressors and submitting Form 4’s on behalf of customers, the ATF’s eForm process has seen approvals in as little as six days.
The reason? Apparently the ATF just figured out how to use the internet. That’s bad for all of us that have been posting savage memes about them on Twitter or making the ever-present joke in certain circles that we lost our guns in a lake. But, for those attempting to buy a suppressor it’s a good thing because the new “eForm” tends to be approved much, much faster than the old paper forms, again according to ZeroHedge:
The new eForm process, launched in December of 2021, expedites the process for a law-abiding citizen to receive a silencer within 90 days. There have been many instances, according to Silencer Shop, where eForms are approved in 30 days and, as noted above, less than a week.
In fact, it’s such a major difference that the CEO of SilencerShop, a massive online seller of suppressors, noticed the change, saying:
“Numerous Silencer Shop customers have already received their eForm 4 approvals. Per the ATF, the timeline was an expected 90 days, and some customers have been approved much sooner. Silencer Shop dealers have been a resource for the community by submitting eForm 4s since the middle of January 2022. We’ve seen applications submitted on Jan 17, 2022 approved on February 11, 2022, which is less 30 days and we’ve even seen a 6 day approval!”
So, while it’s not ideal that the form is required to exercise your 2nd Amendment rights, at least the wait has gotten shorter.
By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.
This story syndicated with permission from The Liberty Leader