Telling ATF what happened does not close the matter, because the bound record still has a firearm in it that is no longer on the premises. Licensees shall reflect the theft or loss of a firearm as a DISPOSITION ENTRY in the Record of Acquisition and Disposition not later than 7 days following discovery of the theft or loss. So a single incident starts two clocks from the same moment of discovery: 48 hours to report it to ATF under § 9.2, and seven days to record it. The shorter one is the one people remember; the longer one is the one that leaves the record wrong if it is forgotten.

The entry is not simply a note that the firearm has gone. It must record whether the incident is a THEFT or a LOSS — the regulation treats those as different facts, not synonyms — together with the ATF-issued Incident Number and the Incident Number provided by the local law enforcement agency. Both numbers are things a licensee receives from someone else, which means the record entry depends on having actually made the report and the local notification, rather than merely intending to.

Read alongside § 8.1, the logic is consistent. A disposition is how a firearm leaves the record, whatever the reason it left; the seven-day disposition clock from § 8.1 is the same seven days here. What the theft-or-loss case adds is the pair of incident numbers, which turn a bare disposition into something that can be matched against the report ATF already holds and the report the local agency already holds. The paper trail is being kept joinable from three directions at once.