Over at The Truth About Guns, Nick Leghorn updates readers on ATF staffing and NFA wait times, and the picture is not pretty. He notes that wait times have gone from seven months for applications submitted early this year to an anticipated fifteen months for applications submitted today. Ballooning application numbers have swamped ATF’s NFA Branch, and that means longer turnaround times for those tax stamps.

According to Nick, there will be nearly twenty new hires brought in to deal with the mountain of paperwork that is accumulating out there in West Virginia. But he points out that this will take some time to make a difference in wait times, so don’t get your hopes up on seeing your recent purchases any time soon.

The new examiners will definitely add more bandwidth to the system and allow them to process a higher volume of the 60,000+ applications that are piled up, but they will be inexperienced and therefore it will take some time for them to be trained and “ramp up” to meet the demand.