current ATF wait time

[John from MD]

Mine was March 12th, still waiting.

 

[BigRick]

Buddy of mine got his suppressor today his check was cashed March 15th. So 11 months for him.

 

[John from MD]

Those wait times on Silencer Shops website are all BS.

 

[Overwatcher]

8 months for me and still waiting.

 

[RRomig]

Those wait times on Silencer Shops website are all BS.

Agreed
In the last couple years I’ve seen the wait time change by months and their calendar never moved.

 

[DaemonAssassin]

8 months for me and still waiting.

When you hit the 10 month mark, then complain.

 

[ar15dave]

11 months and still waiting.

 

[RRomig]

It’s best to just forget about it and one day you’ll get that Christmas in July phone call. Now if you ordered something for a special hunt and timings not looking great invite your dealer. I know I’d jump on a chance to travel hunt lol

 

[lazarus]

It’s best to just forget about it and one day you’ll get that Christmas in July phone call. Now if you ordered something for a special hunt and timings not looking great invite your dealer. I know I’d jump on a chance to travel hunt lol

Lol!

I’ve given up on my can for the upcoming deer season. Actually less because I don’t think my June 1 can will arrive by the end of November. More because I doubt I will have bought the deer gun to go with it. I want a Ruglin 1894 in .357. I am figuring if I am lucky it might exist and actually be available in 2023.

So not this coming deer season, but next.

But that’s fine. I got the Obsidian 45 as much for a range toy to shoot on threaded Glocks as for a lever gun in .357 (range toy AND deer hunting for the 357 lever gun). Well and maybe to shoot 300BO subs in some hypothetical future gun I might own (since I don’t own a 300BO), though I can do that today with my Omega 300.

I’ll just hunt with my Howa 6.5G and Omega 300 again this deer firearm season (oh no. Sucks to be me). That’s likely to be my go to for a lot of years anyway.

 

[John from MD]

Has anyone tried calling the BATF and did they give you an estimate on where your app is in the chain?

 

[alucard0822]

Has anyone tried calling the BATF and did they give you an estimate on where your app is in the chain?

can call at 304-616-4500, have serial#, your name and your dealer's name. They really only give you the current status, pending, delayed, approved etc, anything beyond that is probably conjecture. I usually call after a month or two after my check is cashed just to verify the "pending on" date, then leave it alone till people around my pending date are getting their forms back, just to see if my shop had my number wrong or something, although they are pretty good about calling. I have called literally a couple days before it's approved and they said "pending, give it a couple more months". Most will just tell you "12 months on average", doesn't matter if it's running at 4 or 14. THe reddit NFA tracer is the best way to get an idea how they are running, several people post every day. Currently around the middle of march 2021 for form 4s, and less than a month for 1s

 

[PainAndGain]

Form 4 Paper through SS: batch approval (Rex Silentium MG7, Obsidian 9 FDE, SiCo Omega 45k)

Trust (2RP)

Pending 3/17/21, 6/9/21, 9/27/21

Approved 2/10/22

Tax Stamp In hand TBD

 

[DaemonAssassin]

Form 4 Paper through SS: batch approval (Rex Silentium MG7, Obsidian 9 FDE, SiCo Omega 45k)

Trust (2RP)

Pending 3/17/21, 6/9/21, 9/27/21

Approved 2/10/22

Tax Stamp In hand TBD

And this is the crap that pisses other people off. The inconsistencies in the batch approval process. Some people get their approved stamps one at a time over the course of 6 months and others get 9 months of submissions approved all at once.

They need to either do away with the batch approvals for submissions that are spaced out over time, or they need to do batch approvals for everybody, no matter the time frame on submissions.

 

[lazarus]

can call at 304-616-4500, have serial#, your name and your dealer's name. They really only give you the current status, pending, delayed, approved etc, anything beyond that is probably conjecture. I usually call after a month or two after my check is cashed just to verify the "pending on" date, then leave it alone till people around my pending date are getting their forms back, just to see if my shop had my number wrong or something, although they are pretty good about calling. I have called literally a couple days before it's approved and they said "pending, give it a couple more months". Most will just tell you "12 months on average", doesn't matter if it's running at 4 or 14. THe reddit NFA tracer is the best way to get an idea how they are running, several people post every day. Currently around the middle of march 2021 for form 4s, and less than a month for 1s

Yup. I ignored my first can and got the call 9 or so months later. My 2nd can, ATF was processing stuff a lot faster and people were getting theirs back after 6 and occasionally 7 months. So I called on like the exact date it was 7 months since my check was cashed.

"pending. Yeah we are seeing about 7 months right now, so it might be soon, but give it another month or two since some are taking 8 or 9 months".

My dealer called me 4 days later to say they had the tax stamp in hand. I guess it is possible that the ATF approved it later that day and it just happened to be mailed real fast to my dealer.

 

[PainAndGain]

And this is the crap that pisses other people off. The inconsistencies in the batch approval process. Some people get their approved stamps one at a time over the course of 6 months and others get 9 months of submissions approved all at once.

They need to either do away with the batch approvals for submissions that are spaced out over time, or they need to do batch approvals for everybody, no matter the time frame on submissions.

Update: the other RP on the trust who was pending in late July for a suppressor was also approved same day as my other three suppressors. Assuming they batched him in with mine as well.

No rhyme or reason to the ATF’s form 4 process is aggravating for sure. Curious to see how the e forms work out but honestly I’m not convinced it’ll be that big a difference than now.

 

[lazarus]

Update: the other RP on the trust who was pending in late July for a suppressor was also approved same day as my other three suppressors. Assuming they batched him in with mine as well.

No rhyme or reason to the ATF’s form 4 process is aggravating for sure. Curious to see how the e forms work out but honestly I’m not convinced it’ll be that big a difference than now.

It’ll take awhile before they are processing them, but it’ll likely make a huge difference. They manually key the form in now. Plus some of the other stuff was manual paper pushing. That takes time and more importantly, effort. It lets the same number of employees get a lot more work done. The ATF would be in the best position to figure out what it’ll save and if I remember correctly they are expecting processing times to drop closer to 60 days once they are processing most stuff through the eForms system.

PS of course if the faster processing encourages a ton of people to start buying NFA items and the ATF gets hit with twice or thrice the volume of form 4s that’ll eat up much of all of the time savings just from the significantly larger workload. Though I’d hope they might hire on some more staff if that happened. Not holding my breath though.

 

[SteveG75]

ATF has already said eForms won’t jump the line. At least not jumping the line prior to anything that had been submitted before the eForm 4s came up.

So yeah, maybe this coming fall or winter we will start seeing those processing much more quickly, but it is going to be months more of really slow processing.

I would be surprised though if the ATF isn’t, or doesn’t start soon, quietly processing a few things through the eForms system. Just to make sure they’ve got all of the bugs worked out, both electronically and in their business process. But I’d expect it to be extremely low volume unless they decided to go back on their claim that already submitted paper will process before they process eForms.

Absolute BS from the AFT. I have two Form 4s in since October. EForm 4s are being approved in less than 30 days per buddy who is an FFL/SOT.

 

[Bertfish]

Absolute BS from the AFT. I have two Form 4s in since October. EForm 4s are being approved in less than 30 days per buddy who is an FFL/SOT.

Sure you don't mean eForm 1s?

 

[DaemonAssassin]

Absolute BS from the AFT. I have two Form 4s in since October. EForm 4s are being approved in less than 30 days per buddy who is an FFL/SOT.

October, you say? Some of us have been waiting a lot longer than October.

I've been keeping my eyes peeled for the first eform 4 approval and still haven't seen one yet.

Eform 1 approvals are generally less than 30 days and that has been the norm for a long time.

 

[lazarus]

October, you say? Some of us have been waiting a lot longer than October.

I've been keeping my eyes peeled for the first eform 4 approval and still haven't seen one yet.

Eform 1 approvals are generally less than 30 days and that has been the norm for a long time.

All of this. Unless you are brand new to this, you should know approvals are the better part of a year and have been for a few years now.

But beyond that, ATF has stated they will not be processing eForm 4s until the existing paper has been processed.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they processed a few test eForm 4s to make sure the system and their business process are working out, but I’d suspect it would be a tiny number. They don’t want to run two tandem processes.