The Federal NFA Paperwork Is Gone. The States Are the Rulebook.

By Claire Eason • Published October 14, 2026

Picture a counter in Georgia on a Tuesday morning. A customer who has been waiting three years for a suppressor walks in with cash and a question: is it true I can just do the paperwork here and walk out with it today?

The federal answer is yes. The Georgia answer is a criminal statute that has not moved since 1968, and the two of them no longer agree with each other. That gap — not the ruling, and not the guidance — is what dealers will be living inside for the next several months.

What actually changed, and when

Precision matters here, because three months of news has compressed into one impression. The sequence:

August 5, 2026. Judge James Wesley Hendrix of the Northern District of Texas held in Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF that, with the making and transfer tax zeroed out by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the National Firearms Act's registration and approval provisions could no longer stand as an exercise of Congress's taxing power — and that the 1934 statute could not be rescued under the commerce power either. The injunction ran to the plaintiffs, their members and their customers, not the country.
September 24 – October 5. The Justice Department told Congress it would not appeal, and the window closed. That is the moment the district court's reasoning stopped being a lawsuit and started being the department's policy.
October 9. ATF published an open letter from Director Robert Cekada and a companion FAQ: effective that day, the agency will not require prior approval to make or transfer short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, suppressors or "any other weapons," and will not require them to be registered in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record. Not just for the plaintiffs — for everyone, as a matter of enforcement discretion. Machine guns and destructive devices are untouched, $200 tax included, and voluntary Form 1, 3 and 4 filings are still accepted.
October 12. The nine plaintiff states were due in front of Judge Hendrix, asking whether the injunction reaches every relevant transfer inside their borders and whether the government must identify who is covered. That is a briefing deadline, not a new rule — but it is the next domino.

The states just became the rulebook

Read ATF's own summary line closely: the guidance "does not supersede state and local laws that restrict NFA firearms," and the agency says it cannot tell you whether an item held without federal registration counts as lawfully held for purposes of state law. That is not a dodge. It is the honest answer, and it lands on the one person standing between the customer and the item.

Georgia is the clean example, and it is why the state is now a live national story rather than a local one. Under O.C.G.A. § 16-11-122, possessing a silencer is a crime. The exemption in § 16-11-124(4) covers a silencer held by a person "authorized to possess the same because he has registered" it "in accordance with the dictates of the National Firearms Act." That language was written when federal registration was mandatory and mechanical. A customer who now buys a can on a 4473 and never registers anything has registered nothing under the NFA — and the statute's exemption still points at a registry the federal government no longer requires entries in. Washington, Ohio and Wisconsin are built the same way, and NSSF has counted roughly fifteen states that still require a completed Form 4 for a transfer to be lawful at the state level.

That is why the Firearms Policy Coalition sent letters on October 9 to officials in fifteen states — Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, Michigan and Montana among them — asking them to stop enforcing the laws that hinge on a federal scheme that has been enjoined. "The states that require compliance with this unconstitutional and now-defunct federal scheme should immediately end enforcement," FPC president Brandon Combs said in a release accompanying the letters, and FPC Action Foundation president Cody Wisniewski said the aim was an immediate non-enforcement commitment while legislatures work toward repeal. Georgia Rep. Andrew Clyde told the Daily Caller News Foundation that he has raised it with legislators in his home state and expects them to act. None of that is finished, and legislative calendars are not counter calendars. The state's licensed dealer base is deep and easy to measure — a state-level view like FFL dealers in Georgia shows how many operations are now making the same call on the same law.

The three obligations ATF did not touch

The most common misreading of the last week is that the transfer stopped being a regulated act. It did not. The National Firearms Act stopped applying to these items; the Gun Control Act did not, and ATF's FAQ says so in plain language. Three things sit on the licensee:

Section 922(b)(2). A dealer may not sell or deliver a firearm, including a suppressor, in violation of state or local law. The federal approval queue is gone; the state-law duty on the seller is not. Nothing in the guidance relieves a Georgia dealer of the obligation to think about § 16-11-124 before the item leaves the counter.
Section 922(b)(4). The GCA also bars a dealer from transferring a short-barreled rifle or short-barreled shotgun unless the Attorney General specifically authorizes it — historically satisfied by the NFA approval process. That process is now optional, so ATF concedes there is no working mechanism to authorize those sales. It says it is drafting forms and regulations and, in the interim, will not enforce § 922(b)(4). Dealers can move SBRs and SBSs on a 4473 today. That is a policy, not a statute, and it will be replaced by a rule.
Transportation. The court did not enjoin the GCA's transportation rules. Anyone moving an SBR or SBS across state lines should still file a Form 20, "even if the firearms are not registered," and ATF warns that it is unclear whether state courts will apply the § 926A safe-passage protection to unregistered items. For suppressors, the federal interstate ban is non-enforced; the caution about drive-through states stands.

Add the rest of the unchanged list to your staff briefing, because customers will ask: a 4473 and a NICS check on every covered transfer, records in the bound book, no sales to prohibited persons, and the special occupational tax if you are in the NFA business. That SOT never went anywhere.

What could put the old rules back

ATF's FAQ lists the exits from its own non-enforcement: Congress taxes the items again, a court dissolves or overturns the injunction, or the department rescinds the guidance. None requires a new statute. There is no automatic grandfathering, an item cannot generally be registered after the fact, and the only relief the agency names is an amnesty of up to 90 days that the Attorney General may declare but is not required to. For a customer asking whether to voluntarily withdraw a registration they already hold, that asymmetry is the whole answer: filing is cheap and reversible, delisting is not.

How customers will find you in this market

Here is the practical upside, and it is a dealer-finder story. A buyer whose own local shop refuses to touch the question, a Georgia resident who wants the transfer done by someone who understands the state statute, an out-of-state customer shipping in from a state that still mandates a Form 4, a Texan who has been reading that the case came out of Dallas — all of them now start with a search, not a phone book. "FFL dealer near me," "FFL lookup," "FFL dealer locator by state." What they are really shopping for is competence on one narrow question, and the shop that answers it first wins the transfer, the mount, the ammo and the next can.

So run the search the way your customer runs it. A buyer scans the state to see how deep the licensed base is — FFL dealers in Texas tells you in ten seconds whether a market has real choice — then narrows to the metro list they will actually drive to, the way someone in Atlanta starts with the shops inside the perimeter. Then they call and ask two questions: is your license current, and how do you handle my state's rule on this item. If your shop is not visible on that first list, you are not in the conversation, no matter how good your answer is. That is also the argument for making sure your hours, phone number and transfer policy are current on your listings before the next wave of calls arrives.

Nothing in this column is legal advice, and none of it substitutes for the state law of the buyer's residence or a conversation with counsel. It is a reading of what is on the record.

Write the policy down this week

The dealers who come out of this clean will not be the ones who moved first. They will be the ones who wrote down what they decided. A one-page policy that names the items you will transfer, the states you will and will not sell into, the identification and 4473 steps, the SBR and SBS handling, and the exact language your counter staff should use with a customer from a registration-linkage state — plus the citation that supports each line — is what protects you when an inspector, an insurer or a plaintiff's lawyer asks why the sale happened.

Then watch two things: your own state legislature, where FPC's letters have put the issue on the calendar, and ATF's pending regulation for § 922(b)(4) dealer sales, which is the last piece of the old regime still standing in the gap. The paperwork era ended on October 9. The interpretation era started the same morning, and it is being run state by state — which means the counter, once again, is where the law gets explained.

— Claire Eason, [email protected]