Silencer Saturday #453: NFA Sea Change In Wake Of ATF Guidance Letter

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to TFB’s Silencer Saturday, brought to you by Yankee Hill Machine, manufacturer of the new Victra 20-gauge shotgun suppressor. The ATF released its long-awaited guidance letter regarding changes to the National Firearms Act today. It is a banger. The long and short of it is that the NFA, as we have all known it, is essentially dead. This is breaking news and I scrapped the initially planned article for today to cover this with some initial reaction and thoughts.

Silencer Saturday @ TFB:

• Silencer Saturday #452: Silent But Deadly Subsonic Rifle Match 
• Silencer Saturday #451: Return of the LVAW 
• Silencer Saturday #450: 4473 vs. Form 4 Transfers
• Silencer Saturday #449: A One-Of-A-Kind Ruger American 
• Silencer Saturday #448: Liberty Suppressors Infiniti X First Look

This is not legal advice. I am not your attorney.

A court decision from the Fifth Circuit in Texas found that the NFA was void as to short-barrel rifles, short-barrel shotguns, any other weapons, and silencers because the tax stamps to transfer those items cost $0. The NFA was fundamentally justified as a taxing law but a $0 tax is not truly a tax. It is just a registration and the court struck it down accordingly.

This decision was squishy because it did not apply to everyone around the United States. Thanks to a Supreme Court precedent, federal district court judges can no longer block a law for the entire country. This left the Fifth Circuit judge in a position where he had to block the NFA, but only for those individuals and businesses who were named plaintiffs or members of a named plaintiff, such as the Gun Owners of America.

That left myriad questions about applicability and enforceability because a simple piece of paper saying that you were a GOA member was the difference between owning a silencer with no tax stamp and potentially spending 10 years in federal prison. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was aware of these problems and has been crafting a guidance letter.

We now have that letter and boy is it a change from the status quo! The heart of the letter is this paragraph:

“Consequently, effective October 9, 2026, ATF will no longer require individuals to seek ATF approval under the NFA before making or transferring short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, silencers, and “any other weapon” as defined in 26 U.S.C. § 5845(e). ATF will also no longer require such items to be registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. These policies apply uniformly to anyone otherwise subject to these requirements, not just to the plaintiffs in the litigation.”

You read that correctly. For individuals, most of the NFA's restrictions around SBRs, SBSs, AOWs, and silencers are functionally dead according to this ATF letter, and assuming that it is legal to do so in your state, it appears that you can sell a silencer in a parking lot to someone that you met on TaxSwap. Manufacturing is also unrestricted for individuals. All of those oil filters you've wanted to play with in the past but hadn't due to tax stamps and compliance issues are now fair game as well. There may even be a shortage of pipe cutters and hacksaws at your local hardware store as people start chopping barrels on guns they've always wanted to shorten but had never messed with.

For FFL and SOT dealers, things are not the Wild West but the regulatory burden has now been reduced. Serialized NFA items other than machine guns and destructive devices transfer the same as any other firearm governed by the Gun Control Act of 1968. That means the 4473 and you are on your way.

I have been a little sheepish about the 4473 situation, given some of the questions about implementation, but with this letter now existing I stopped into my friendly local gun store, Gallenson's, in Salt Lake City, and took home a silencer on a 4473 the same day. It felt very weird to not have a tax stamp but these are exciting times.

Yes, that is a wooden silencer. More to come on that.

Dealers also still need to maintain their special occupational tax or SOT if they want to continue dealing in NFA items. The ATF raises five points at the end of the letter that are worth your consideration:

1. The issue of state compliance. Some states have laws that require NFA registration for these items. If those state laws are still in place, the ATF will still issue you a Form 4 for your item on a voluntary basis. This was a great call by the agency to leave that option available to people who need it for state law compliance.

2. Some states have laws on the books referring to federal law and stating that any item possessed legally under federal law is legal under state law. Whether or not the current ATF letter covers that situation is a matter to discuss with competent legal counsel in your state. If you live in a gun-friendly state you should probably work with your legislature to clean up that situation.

The ATF letter also notes that interstate travel with stampless NFA items is in a bit of a gray area. They are still working to clarify that particular situation but if you want my free legal advice I would suggest that you don't travel interstate with a non-stamped NFA item at this time. The risk isn't worth the reward. If you frequently travel between states with NFA items, a voluntary Form 4 may still be a good idea while that situation is unclear.

Today's letter is the biggest NFA news since the machine gun ban in 1986 and may even be bigger than that. With over-the-counter silencers, private party sales, and home-built SBRs becoming the new normal, it will be very exciting to see what types of new products emerge on the market.

On that note, stocks for certain pistols that would make good SBRs may become very hard to find. I know I have struggled to find an original Galil stock for my SAR. That is not going to get easier now. This guidance letter also has me considering purchasing a small lathe to start building weird silencers for all kinds of different guns in my collection.

Some observers have correctly noted that because this is an ATF policy, in the future the ATF could also just change this policy. That is very true. The ATF's own FAQ page mentions this policy concern. While that may happen in the future, the simple fact that we are now transferring these NFA items without putting them in the NFRTR makes future enforcement of that policy change very difficult.

The ATF has done nonsensical and difficult things in the past. The fact pattern of an injunction followed by a guidance letter that shields dealers and individuals alike from ATF enforcement and which states that prior registration requirements are no longer effective will be a much harder wall to climb over than a simple administrative rule decreeing that arm braces are actually rifle stocks. That argument did not hold up in the courts and I would not expect a future enforcement action regarding stampless NFA items to have any more success. That's not a guarantee and that is not legal advice but I feel safe enough about this to participate myself.

That's all I have for now. I'm heading to my basement to remove some permanently attached muzzle devices. I may even get the hacksaw out. We'll see.

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