Florida Drops ATF Approval Rule

Florida residents can now legally possess suppressors, short-barrel rifles, and short-barrel shotguns without ever getting ATF sign-off.

What's new: In an October 11th letter to the state's police chiefs, sheriffs, and law enforcement command staff, Florida State Attorney Brian S. Kramer laid out how his office will treat the fallout from Silencer Shop v. ATF and the agency's subsequent decision not to enforce most National Firearms Act registration requirements. His conclusion: Florida's own NFA mirror law never actually required federal registration — it just assumed the feds would handle that part.

The legal mechanics: Florida Statute 790.221 bans short-barreled rifles and shotguns, but carves out an exception for firearms "lawfully owned and possessed under provisions of federal law." Kramer's office says that exception was always the controlling language, not the ATF paperwork.

• No independent state requirement: Kramer wrote that the statute "does not independently require an ATF Form 1, Form 4, tax stamp, or registration in the federal registry."
• Suppressors were never regulated by Florida at all, so the absence of a tax stamp "does not make possession of a suppressor unlawful under Florida law."
• Case law backing: Kramer cited Rinzler v. Carson, where the Florida Supreme Court held that ambiguity in a penal statute must favor the person facing criminal liability.

The letter doesn't stop at legal theory — it tells cops how to act on it. Kramer instructed officers that finding an SBR, SBS, or suppressor, or someone's inability to produce a tax stamp, "should not by itself be treated as evidence that a crime is being committed." That means no detention, search, or arrest based solely on unregistered possession, and no automatic plain-view seizure just because the item looks like NFA hardware.

"The current federal framework does not support that conclusion, and Florida law does not impose an independent registration requirement."

Yes, but: Machine guns and destructive devices got no such break. Kramer specifically warned officers to keep those items separate in their heads — they remain fully regulated under the NFA, untouched by the ATF's non-enforcement stance.

The bigger picture: Florida isn't unique in having an NFA mirror law — the ATF estimates at least 15 states wrote similar registration requirements into their own statutes, assuming federal paperwork would always exist to point to. Now that the Silencer Shop injunction has gutted that assumption, each of those states has to decide for itself whether its law bans the item outright or, like Florida's, just leans on federal lawfulness as the test.

What to watch: Florida is among the first to put its interpretation in writing. How other mirror-law states rule — and whether their legislatures step in to rewrite statutes rather than leave it to a prosecutor's memo — will determine whether this becomes a 15-state pattern or a one-state outlier.