With the National Firearms Act tax on short-barreled firearms and suppressors zeroed out effective Jan. 1, 2026, the ATF was swamped with submissions.
A byproduct of July 2025's One Big Beautiful Bil – which originally included both the language of the Hearing Protection Act and the SHORT Act, which would have deregulated the popular devices – the tax reduction took effect on New Year's Day. Despite being a holiday, gun owners and FFLs quickly moved to upload some 150,000 new e-Forms requests, compared to a typical daily volume of around 2,500.
This came amid system outages as dealers who had stacked up factory SBRs and suppressors on layaway programs over the past few months submitted Form 4 transfer requests in mass, while individuals eager to make a new NFA item on a "free" Form 1 did the same. The industry had unsuccessfully sought forbearance on tax collection during the seven months from when the OBBB was signed to when the tax actually dropped. The ATF took the eForms system offline for the last week of 2025 to prepare for the change.
Still, there were lots of "bumps" suffered by many, although there were at least some anecdotal reports of 24-hour approvals over the weekend.
The National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade group for the American firearms industry, alerted partners on Friday that ATF experienced "intermittent IT system glitches and delays," but the agency "emphasized that it is actively working to address these technical issues and is engaging directly with affected industry members to resolve problems as quickly as possible."
Silencer Central on the eForms delays and technical issues:
The volume was unprecedented and speaks to the need for further reform.
“The sheer numbers speak for themselves when it comes to America’s appetite to shoot suppressed," Mark Oliva, NSSF's Public Affairs Director, told Guns.com. "That magnitude is stunning and what we predicted. When the NFA tax was reduced to $0, literally hundreds of thousands of Americans spoke with their wallets and purchased a suppressor. Congress should make this tax reduction permanent by passing the Hearing Protection Act, so unnecessary barriers to purchasing what is a hearing safety device are removed."
With the staggering number of new suppressors and short-barreled firearms being produced and transferred in 2026, and the GOP still narrowly in charge of Congress in an election year, the time could be ripe for consigning the NFA, or at least large parts of it, to the dustbin of history.
Plus, Democrats have signaled that once they regain control of the federal government, they intend to turn the tax back on and skyrocket it from the legacy $200 to as much as $4,700.
