Tag Archives: NFRTR

Of suppressor deregulation and upcoming ATF changes

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At SHOT Show this year I had a chance to throw some knives and hawks on range day and did so like shit. They were SOGs and, while I can make the excuse I wasn’t used to them and prefer my own edged weapons which I do throw much better, I still did miserably.

sog knives and hawks

However, I also did it right behind Josh Waldron, the co-founder and CEO of SilencerCo, the company that is like the Glock of suppressors. How big are they? They ship 10,000 cans a month, which is more than most suppressor makers ship in a year.

I had a chance last week to catch back to up him without the tomahawks and talk about various states dropping prohibitions against private suppressor ownership (42 states now allow it), hunting with suppressors (39 now allow it, up from 22 in 2011), potential deregulation of suppressors from NFA requirements via the Hearing Protection Act, and the impact that ATF 41F is going to have on trusts and CLEO requirements.

SilencerCo.founder.believes.in_.creating.a.lifestyle.to_.mainstream.suppressors
“We’re trying to make guns sexy again because they always really have been in this country,” Waldron said. “It’s been part of the fabric of the culture here but we want to make sure that that continues and so we’re trying to revive that.”

You can read the interview over at Guns.com.

Suppressor numbers nearly 600,000 nationwide, becoming mainstream

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Once the fodder of Hollywood spy movies and pulp fiction novels, the NFA-compliant suppressor is becoming ever more common in its use and adoption with numbers at an all-time high.

No matter whether you call it a silencer, a suppressor, or just a can, the mechanism defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 as any device for silencing, muffling, or diminishing the report of a portable firearm, is shedding decades of misinformation and rapidly becoming more and more mainstream. According to figures released by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives earlier this year, there were, as of March 2014, no less than 571,750 legal suppressors listed in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record (NFRTR).

As benchmark in the increase in the number of yearly transfers done on NFA items, such as suppressors, in 1984 the ATF collected just $666,000 in transfer and making taxes on these items. Three decades later, with no increase in the tax rate, the ATF collected almost $18.2 million in transfers, according to its 2013 figures, an increase of over 2,700 percent.

suppressed 1911as
Read the rest in my column at Guns.com, where I get the low-down on the suppressor industry from the head of the American Suppressor Association.

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