One of the things Virginia lawmakers are trying to cram through is that (essentially) "unserialized" guns will be forbidden.

Discussions last weekend brought the question, "what are the requirements for a serial number?"

Is there anything that dictates that?

If a fella had a couple of blank lowers, for instance, and wanted to actually put serial numbers on them... could he simply mark them "1" and "2" and call it good?

Once a fella chose a number and marked his parts, would that number have to be registered with some organization? (I'm sure that gets extra messy...)

Surely, this is just a scheme to get people away from making their own guns (which good patriots have been doing forever), but the serialization thing has become the source of several good discussions among my friends, with no good answers yet.



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ETA: Well, I may have surfed into the answer already. Looks like 27 CFR 479.102 addresses this.
Link

ATF has specs (height, width, depth) for engraving an NFA item with your trust or company name. But all that stuff has to be on a Form 1-4. I don't know how VA's law will be worded. Seems to me it'd take some real effort for VA to create whatever registry would be required to hold homemade guns' serial numbers. I doubt ATF would be allowed to just let VA interface with their eForms to keep track of everything.

Edit:

That federal code you reference (I believe) only applies to manufacturers, i.e. an 07 FFL, and is not a state thing. Non-manufacturers are not required by the feds to engrave non-NFA guns for personal use. Probably can't sell them legally. But then who could trace that sale? 3-D printers make all this BS moot. What's to stop you from printing a bunch of guns with the same serial number and just not keeping them all in the same place?

It’s going to be interesting to see what the numbskulls in our legislature try to pull on this one. It’s clear that most of them know both Jack and Squat about guns.

As for the federal markings… Rick, as an 07, do you do some marking?
I’ve got a lot of questions about equipment and methods, and could use some guidance.

I do not do engraving. Before I got my SOT and needed engraving done, I went to a local guy who works out of his garage. His setup was very cool. He charged $40 and it was worth that just to watch how he did it. The guys who do this stuff know the ATF specs and can set up their rig to do it compliantly.

Thank you, Rick.

There's a fellow up the road who I think can do some engraving for me. Like you, I'd be okay with putting forth a few bucks to see how he does it.

If I put together more than one, though, I'd love to be able to do the engravings myself.

Maine where I lived just passed a silly law about this. The goal of the law is to have you get a background check (and hence practically registration) of the item. So a SOT has to mark it as if they are making the item and do a 4733 to transfer it back to you. Till you see the law you have no idea what it means, but the goal is that you have to register it in some way, not just mark it. You can easily mark an item yourself if that's all you care about.

The depth requirement is 0.003” IIRC.