Wednesday, April 06, 2016

What's 9 Million Hours Among Friends?

ATF is updating the 4473. [More]

Hey, it's not like your time has any value:*
5 An estimate of the total number of respondents and the amount of time estimated for an average respondent to respond: An estimated 18,275,240 respondents will take 30 minutes to complete the form. 
Maybe it's another April Fools joke:


Laff-a-minute, those guys:


*UPDATE: I'm reminded the current version (pg. 6, "Paperwork Reduction Act Notice)) says "30 minutes' as well. Maybe that's just reflective of "progressive" bureaucratic Opposite Day "efficiency."

8 comments:

Dale_ND said...

Any idea what the changes to the 4473 form will be? The current form does not take 30 minutes to complete, so what would require the new form to take 30 minutes?

JohninMd.(Help!?!!) said...

Yeah, it's all fun and games until you shoot a feral JBT off your roof....

Ed said...

"Time is money." - Benjamin Franklin

It is time that they stop wasting our time and our money.

FBHO said...

David,

Are you aware if ATF is proposing any changes to Form 4473? The Federal Register notification does not allude to any specific changes. Thanks.

David Codrea said...

I need to ask someone who speaks fedbureaucratese to translate this for me.

Anonymous said...

This site:
https://blog.princelaw.com/2016/04/12/atf-soliciting-comments-on-proposed-revisions-to-the-firearms-transaction-record-4473/

has links to the draft form as well as some discussion of the changes.

-MadMagyar

Anonymous said...

The foregoing comment was brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department. Guess I should read the current day's posts before commenting on older ones, eh? (trying to catch up from earlier in the month).
=MM

Jonathan H said...

I've read these before and this Federal Register notice does not give many details to help, even if you understand the bureacratese. My GUESS, from what little the notice does say, is that they are going to expand the warning at the top of the first page and the certification on the second to make more clear their recently expanded position on straw purchasing and give more discussion on who is prohibited from purchasing a firearm, but that is just a guess from reading between the (few) lines of description.

I do note, however, that OMB control numbers (required for forms that collect information from the public) expire in 3 years and the current Form 4473 (https://www.atf.gov/file/61446/download) was last updated in April 2012, so an additional reason for this notice may be to update the OMB control number, though again it isn't clear from the overly brief notice. Here is an FCC discussion on information collection that touches on the OMB control number.