At the Briefing FFL Compliance Summit last week in Dallas, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) walked industry professionals through a new way to answer crime-gun traces. The program is called FFL Direct. ATF billed it as a no-cost way to cut the burden on Federal Firearms Licensees (FFL) and to get serial-number hits back to the National Tracing Center (NTC) without a clerk, a fax machine, or a voicemail. The slides compared it with the older NTC Connect program and then showed, in working JSON, exactly what a request and a reply look like.