Making an NFA firearm is an approval event before it is a manufacturing event. No person shall make a firearm unless they have filed a completed application on ATF Form 1 (5320.1), Application to Make and Register a Firearm, in duplicate, executed under the penalties of perjury — and have RECEIVED the Director’s approval. The approval is not merely permission: it is what effectuates registration of the firearm to the applicant. Where the applicant is not a licensee qualified under this part and is a partnership, company (including an LLC), association, trust, or corporation, the Form 1 information must be furnished for each responsible person.

The making tax is where the pinned text will surprise readers working from memory. The rate is $200 for each firearm made in the case of a machine gun or a destructive device, and $0 for any other firearm made. The applicant remits that amount with the application according to which case applies. Payment is evidenced the same way the rest of this part evidences things — the Director indicates the maker paid by adding a stamp of the proper denomination bearing the words “National Firearms Act”, affixed or applied to each approved application, and the stamps may be adhesive, in electronic form, or in another form the Director designates.

Identification of the applicant is unusually heavy for a form. An individual applicant must securely attach to each copy of the Form 1 a 2 x 2-inch photograph showing a full front view with the head bare, taken within 1 year before the date of the application, and must attach two properly completed FBI Forms FD-258 (Fingerprint Card), clear enough for accurate classification. A non-licensee entity applicant is identified instead by name and the exact location of the place of business. The Director considers the application for approval or disapproval, and in addition to any other records checks MUST contact the National Instant Criminal Background Check System. An application will not be approved if making or possessing the firearm would place the maker in violation of law.

Then the sequence closes. On approval, the Director returns the original to the applicant and retains the duplicate; on disapproval, the original Form 1 and the remittance come back. Only on receiving the approved application may the maker make the firearm — and the regulation states the negative in terms it leaves no room in: the maker must not, under any circumstances, make the firearm until the Director has approved and returned the application with the National Firearms Act stamp affixed. The made firearm must then be legibly identified with an individual serial number placed on the frame or receiver in a manner not susceptible of being readily obliterated, altered, or removed, together with the maker’s name and the place where it was made — and it sits, registered, in the National Firearms Registration and Transfer Record, the central registry of all such firearms in the United States not under the control of the United States.