Interstate Handgun Sales Ruling and ATF's NFA Timetable

By Fred Thompson • Published September 30, 2026

Two stories defined the week for federal firearms licensees, and they point in the same direction: the paperwork wall around NFA items and out-of-state handguns is coming down in increments, on someone else's schedule, and the dealer is the one who has to decide when it is safe to walk through the opening.

On September 18, a divided Fifth Circuit panel held that the federal ban on direct interstate handgun sales violates the Second Amendment. Four days later, ATF's leadership stood in front of a room of licensees in Dallas and put timelines on the record for the NFA guidance dealers have been waiting on since the summer injunction. Neither development is a rule yet. Both change how a shop should be thinking about next quarter.

The Fifth Circuit deleted the middleman

In Elite Precision Customs v. ATF, a 2-1 panel (Judge Jerry E. Smith, joined by Judge Kurt Engelhardt; Judge Catharina Haynes dissenting) held that the combined operation of three provisions of 18 U.S.C. § 922 — (a)(3), (a)(5) and (b)(3) — cannot stand. Those provisions are what force a lawful buyer to purchase a handgun from an out-of-state dealer only by having it shipped to a second dealer in the buyer's home state, where it sits, gets logged, and gets a transfer fee attached.

The plaintiffs included a Texas dealer, Elite Precision Customs, and two nonresident buyers who said the mandatory second transfer typically cost them $30 to $40 and days of delay. The court reversed the dismissal of the case and rendered judgment for the plaintiffs, and it did not accept the government's argument that the burden is tolerable because another, more expensive route stays open. The opinion's framing is blunt: this is a purchase ban, and a government that cannot ban a right does not get to put a tollbooth in front of it.

It also creates a live circuit split. The Second Circuit upheld the same restrictions in United States v. Vereen, and the First Circuit has placed acquisition itself outside the Second Amendment's protection in Beckwith v. Frey. Two appellate courts now read the same statutes differently, which is the classic setup for Supreme Court review.

What it means at the counter depends on where you sit. The decision binds within the Fifth Circuit — Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. A licensee in Texas or Louisiana may now be able to transfer a handgun directly to a resident of another state, but three cautions belong in front of that sentence. First, no written ATF guidance has been issued on how the agency will treat those transfers, and the ban remains on the books everywhere outside the circuit. Second, the sale still has to satisfy the buyer's home-state law, and states with rosters, waiting periods, and purchase limits have not repealed any of it. Third, the government can seek en banc review or certiorari, and a dealer who rebuilds his intake process around a panel opinion that gets vacated has a problem. This is a conversation to have with your attorney and your distributor, not with a customer who read a headline.

The business read is worth stating plainly: if nonresidents can buy handguns directly from you, transfer-fee volume goes down and selection becomes the differentiator. Shops with deep handgun inventory and honest pricing win that traffic. Shops that treated a $30 transfer as a business line lose some of it. That is a merchandising question you can start answering now, whatever the courts do next.

In Dallas, ATF put timelines on the record

At The Briefing, an FFL compliance summit hosted by FastBound that ran September 23 through 25 in Dallas, ATF Director Robert Cekada and the bureau's chief legal counsel took questions from licensees. The headlines from that room, as reported by AmmoLand and the trade press:

Suppressor and SBR guidance is "close." Cekada said the guidance is not finished and that ATF is one of three stakeholders, alongside the Department of Justice and the White House. He expects release within a couple of weeks.
A dealer who moved a suppressor on a Form 4473 will not be cited. Asked directly how industry operations investigators should treat such transfers, Cekada said there would be no violation. The former head of ATF's NFA division added that the agency's policy is to presume those transfers were lawful. With more than 2.3 million suppressors sold this year, that is the answer a lot of shops have been waiting for.
The SBR and SBS carve-out is the unfinished half. Short-barreled rifles and shotguns are covered by the injunction, but a separate Gun Control Act provision requires attorney-general authorization for the transfer, which is why your can clears the counter in an afternoon while your SBR paperwork still crawls. The coming guidance is expected to address that.
Form 4473 is being rewritten. The county box goes away, and the form is being conformed to recent rulings including the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Hemani. It will not be out until after the holiday season.
Handgun sales to 18- to 20-year-olds are moving. Following a September 17 DOJ Office of Legal Counsel opinion, ATF is updating its systems to process those sales. Machine guns and destructive devices are likely to stay at 21.
Forced reset triggers remain unresolved. Cekada said some devices on the market are true FRTs and some are machine guns under the statute, and declined to say which.

What "a couple of weeks" is worth to a licensee

Here is the part of the week that deserves a cooler head. Verbal answers from the director are not the policy document, and ATF has not published a word of the guidance. Podium timelines slip. Guidance gets lawyered down between drafts. Everything ATF has proposed since April under its regulatory review — stabilizer-brace rescission, removal of the chief law enforcement officer notification requirement, Form 4473 revisions, record-retention changes — remains proposed until a final rule takes effect. Proposed is not law, and an enforcement posture announced at a seminar is not a defense you can hand an inspector.

The discipline that has always served licensees still applies: keep the bound book clean, answer trace requests inside the 24-hour window, follow the certified-copy requirement for licensee-to-licensee transfers, and keep your employees' in-state and out-of-state knowledge current. What has changed is that there is now a real checklist worth tracking.

What to do this week

Write down your current policy for each NFA category — suppressor, SBR, SBS, AOW — and the date you adopted it. If guidance lands and your read was wrong, you want a documented, good-faith process, not a shrug.
Do not change counter procedure on the strength of a Q&A recap. Wait for the document.
Flag every nonresident handgun inquiry. Ask for the buyer's state, then check that state's law before you promise anything.
Audit your recordkeeping now, while it is quiet. Record retention and electronic bound-book rules are both in play, and a rule change is a bad time to discover a hole in your files.
Educate customers in writing. A one-page explainer at the counter about what is and is not legally transferable this month saves your staff a hundred arguments and keeps a shop on the right side of an overeager interpretation.

None of this is a prediction about how the cases end. It is the ordinary work of running a licensed business through a year when the rules are moving faster than the forms. The dealers who come out of 2026 ahead will be the ones who kept their records tight, their staff trained, and their opinions flexible.

— Fred Thompson, [email protected]