ATF eForms Filing System Temporarily Crashes

A website crash sparked a wildfire of rumors in the online gun community last week. Hearsay spread quickly on through the internet grapevine after the ATF’s eForms website crashed, but now, that worry seems unfounded.

The error message visitors to the ATF’s eForms page received on February 29.

The Background

Rumors had been circulating for about a week that the ATF was going to take its eForms website down due to budgetary concerns. Then, on February 29, the site did indeed go down. This seemed to confirm the prior scuttlebutt, and sent many observers into a tizzy.

That all changed on Monday, when the system resurfaced. With eForms’ return, it appears that this gossip is untrue. 

The ATF’s eForms website on Monday, March 4.

What is the ATF’s eForms Program?

The NFA’s eForms system allows anyone who wants to build or purchase a suppressor, short-barreled rifle, short-barreled shotgun, or any other type of firearm regulated by the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. Although planning for the eForms filing system began in 2013, the ATF didn’t actually implement a live version of it until December of 2021.

The eForms system has apparently allowed the ATF to significantly improve some of their processing time for Form 4s. This is a form specifically for people who want to buy NFA-regulated firearms. The ATF had previously been taking hundreds of days (in some cases, around a year) to process Form 4s. Recently, some applicants have been receiving approval in a matter of days.

Final Thoughts

When the rumors first began about the ATF removing their eForms system, I was pretty personally devastated. I’m looking at picking up a few new silencers soon, and I thought that it was going to be years again before I got the chance to actually use them. Hopefully, now that the system is back up, the shorter wait times we’ve been experiencing recently will become the norm.