The ATF released its 2025 Firearms Commerce Report this week, and there are several interesting stories to be gleaned from the agency's data. Let's start with the absolute explosion in the number of suppressors that are legally owned.
According to the agency, as of June 2026 there were 6,342,117 suppressors registered under the NFA. Texas is home to more than 1 million of those, with Florida's 433,743 suppressors a distant second. Georgia, Utah, Virginia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Arizona each have more than 200,000 registered suppressors, while Rhode Island (where suppressors are banned for civilian use) comes in dead last with 277 registered suppressors.
While the demise of the NFA taxes on these items has led to a sharp increase in their sales, the ATF's latest report shows that growth in NFA transfers is nothing new. In 2013 ATF processed about 1.09 million NFA forms. By 2024 that number had grown to 4,732,203; an increase of more than 300 percent in a little more than a decade.
I knew that suppressors have become more popular in recent years, but I had no idea there were more than 6 million registered suppressors around the country. And at the current volume, we could be looking at more than 7 million by the end of the year.
While there's been phenomenal growth in NFA items, we continue to see a decline in the number of FFLs around the country. Nationwide, active FFLs declined from 134,811 in 2022 to 128,672 in 2024. Those numbers include every kind of FFL license, but the trend includes Type 01 dealer licenses (52,993 to 47,776), Type 02 pawnbrokers (6,981 to 6,149), and even Type 03 collectors (53,475 to 49,689).
The overall number of FFLs fell by about 4.5 percent in three years, while the number of Type 01 dealers declined by almost 10 percent. Unfortunately, the ATF report doesn't include state-by-state numbers for every specific type of FFL, so while we know that New York, for example, lost about 13 percent of FFLs between 2021 and 2024, we don't know how many of those were actually firearm retailers. Maryland lost 10.8 percent during that same time period. Those losses, though, aren't limited to anti-gun regimes. FFLs in Louisiana declined by 11.7 percent between 2021 and 2024, and Ohio and Missouri also saw more than 10 percent of their FFLs disappear
Just four states had more FFLs in 2024 than in 2021. Idaho and South Dakota aren't much of a surprise, but I was shocked to learn that New Jersey added 20 FFLs between 2021 and 2024. I was even more surprised to learn that FFL licenses have substantially increased in California over the past few years too, climbing from 9,128 in 2021 to 11,055 in 2024.
I imagine the gun control lobby is surprised and disappointed by those figures, since it suggests there's still a vibrant community of gun owners and Second Amendment advocates in the state despite their decades-long quest to eradicate lawful gun ownership.
According to the ATF, the number of firearms produced in the United States declined from a peak of 13.81 million in 2021 to 9.47 million in 2024. The rate of decline appears to have slowed in recent years, however, which is good news. And while the number of domestically-produced guns has dropped, we've seen an increase in the number of import applications during that same time period, from 11,378 to 13,777 in 2024.
The number one country for firearm imports? It's not Austria, which is home to Glock. Nor is it Brazil, which is the home base of Taurus. Turkey had the largest number of imports in 2024, with 1,518,675 firearms traveling to their new home in the U.S. that year.
Austria did have the highest number of handgun imports at 922,896, but Turkey had the most rifles (182,098) and shotguns (797,394) imported into the U.S.
I'm not really surprised by any of those figures, but I was dumbfounded to learn that the country with the second highest number of rifles imported into the United States was Canada, of all places. I figured Canada was far more interested in banning rifles than exporting them, but after doing a little bit of research it appears that the reason Canada exported more than 150,000 rifles into the U.S. in 2024 is because Savage Arms operates a factory in Ontario that produces most of its rimfire rifles.
Will the U.S.-Canadian trade war cause prices on those rifles to soar upward? Probably not, at least based on the current targets of President Trump's tariffs. The administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on a variety of Canadian goods this summer and followed up with import bans on nearly $1 billion worth of Canadian products that took effect September 29. So far, however, Canadian-made firearms haven't been targeted by those measures.
You can read the entire ATF report here, and if you're a data nerd there's plenty to keep you occupied for a while. The bottom line is that while the U.S. firearms industry has seen some contractions over the past couple of years, overall the industry is still quite strong. NFA items like suppressors are really taking off in popularity, and I expect that trend to continue in the future, especially once we get guidance from the ATF on what the Jensen and Silencer Shop decision means for future purchases of suppressors, short-barreled firearms, and AOWs.
