Comment on FR Doc # 2026-09182

RIN 1140-AA82 - Comments of B&T USA, LLC on "Revising Firearms Transaction Record, 'Form 4473,'" Docket No. ATF-2026-0001, 91 FR 25432 (May 8, 2026). Full comment attached as PDF; this is a summary. B&T USA, LLC is a licensed manufacturer of destructive devices, ammunition for destructive devices, and armor piercing ammunition (Type 10), a licensed importer of the same (Type 11), and a Special Occupational Taxpayer. B&T USA does not complete Forms 4473. It disposes of firearms only to other licensees and to governmental agencies. It takes no position on the retail provisions that make up most of this rule. It supports the rule, which reads 18 U.S.C. 922(t)(1)(D) and 1028(d)(3) as Congress wrote them and replaces five instruments of guidance with legislative text. 1. Proposed Sec. 478.124(a)(2)(iv) should be redrafted. It is new text creating a Form 4473 exception for transfers "[t]o a governmental official, agent, or employee, or to a governmental agency, for official duty use. See Sec. 478.134." Current Sec. 478.124(a) contains no such exception. The exemption for sales to governmental entities is supplied by Sec. 478.141(a), implementing 18 U.S.C. 925(a)(1), which imposes no "official duty use" condition and which this rule neither amends nor cites. Sec. 478.134 governs only law enforcement officers purchasing personally on an agency certification and says nothing about agencies. The subparagraph merges two distinct regimes under a condition matching neither, and invites the reading that a sale to an agency not shown to be for "official duty use" now requires a Form 4473. ATF should delete it or state the two regimes separately, citing the authority for each. 2. Six instruments this rule depends on are not final. Instructions 3 and 5 restate Secs. 478.96 and 478.124 in full. RIN 1140-AB05, published and closing the same day, adds a new Sec. 478.96(c) - its entire operative provision. If AB05 is finalized first, this rule's restatement deletes it. Neither rule addresses ordering; the severability clause (well drafted, and credited) cannot reach a cross-rule dependency; and footnote 8's expectation of final rules "at about the same time" is not a sequencing rule. That AB05 was drafted against this text is demonstrable: its instruction 5 amends Sec. 478.124(i) "between the semicolon and 'and other required information'" - a construction absent from the codified text and exact in this rule's proposed Sec. 478.124(i). This rule also retains 18 U.S.C. 847 in the authority citation while AB05 drops it. Separately, Sec. 478.124(h) cites Sec. 478.130(a)(4), (c), and (e)(1), a section proposed in RIN 1140-AA94 and not final, and leaves "qualifying provider" undefined. Further dependencies: RIN 1140-AA85 (Sec. 478.102(d)), RIN 1140-AA95 (retention), collection 1140-0020, and an unpublished FBI rule (footnote 9). 3. The rescission of Sec. 478.131 is largely correct but loses three things. The duplication rationale holds for Sec. 478.131(a)(2). It does not hold for Sec. 478.131(a)(3), which supplies the retention period for the Director's certification under Sec. 478.102(d)(3) and is anchored to a form this rule removes from Sec. 478.134 as obsolete while leaving Sec. 478.129 unamended. No proposed provision supplies a replacement period. The rule also removes OMB control numbers 1140-0045 and 1140-0021 without discussion; the PRA section addresses only 1140-0020. 4. The RFA certification and PRA estimate need factual support. The certification counts no affected entities and rests on the premise of no quantifiable costs, while Sec. 478.124(h)(2) requires daily backup of e-Forms 4473, including pending and incomplete forms, to on-premises physical storage - expressly more stringent than the Sec. 478.130 baseline. The 30-to-15-minute claim states no derivation, no respondent count, and no burden hours, and does not count the new private-party and firearms handler check responses the rule creates. 5. Arithmetic. Tables 1 and 2 are internally consistent, which B&T USA reports. Three items do not reconcile: the text states 14,632 where Table 2 states and sums to 14,636; "on average, 1,797" is a five-year total, given correctly later as roughly 360 per year; and the text's 1,050 violations in 619 inspections cannot be reconciled with Table 1's 658. ATF should state which population each figure describes and define the 22.5 million transaction figure (AB05 uses 13.09 million). 6. Twelve technical corrections appear in the attachment, including the Sec. 478.102(e) citation to a nonexistent Sec. 478.124(c)(4)(iv) - identified independently by the commenter at ATF-2026-0001-0271, whose analysis B&T USA endorses - and a conflict between the preamble and Sec. 478.11 over which state's acceptance governs digital identification documents. B&T USA endorses ATF's decision to proceed by regulation rather than guidance, and recommends the rule take effect on the later of publication or OMB approval of Form 4473.