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This reminds me of the insane backlog of FBI background checks for NFA items (suppressors, machine guns, SBRs). Government has no incentive to process these things in a timely matter. People have to contact their congressmen sometimes just to push the sludge along. From what I've read it's not even a different background check than when you buy a gun either, just that the extra steps and the willful laziness to slowdown something the government probably doesn't like doing but has to.

You can buy a gun in 15 minutes at a gun store normally. Want to put a suppressor on it or that gun just happens to be 1" shorter than 16"? You're going to wait 9-24 months longer. Ridiculous doesn't even begin to describe it.

[int_19h]

Government as a whole does have an incentive to process these things fast enough to avoid a backlog, since they get $200 for every transfer.

The problem is that government is so large that, in practice, the ATF doesn't care, because that $200 just goes into the US Treasury general fund. If they actually kept most of the tax they collect, I think we'd see much faster processing times, and eFile would have happened many years ago.