In terms of technical details, whether the FFL is an intermediate owner of the gun or just facilitating the transfer, I don't know, but the buyer does fill out the 4473, check is run, I get the money and a private bill of sale with names, date, serial, and FFL name from the buyer, and pay the FFL $25 (funny that, a lot of them have initially whined that it's just sooo hard they need more, one guy wanted $75 + 10% cost, but they always seem to get reasonable when I offer to shop around).
Worth it for both the peace of mind of legally covering my ass, and making as sure as I can that I'm not putting a deadly weapon into hands that shouldn't have one. Personally I think it should be the only way to transfer, but tinfoilers think even tens of millions of individual hard-paper records literally scattered across the country is a "registry" 
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