With Corona Virus / COVID-19 / Beer Flu bringing a whole slew of first time firearm buyers, there’s a lot of questions on exactly what it takes to buy a gun here in Texas.
First off, without getting into some esoteric rants, just ignore anything you are told by some random guy at Dick’s about “Class 3 licenses”, “gun registration”, or how he “worked for the CIA in ‘Nam.”
So, your first step is selecting a firearm to purchase. Let’s assume you’re using us regardless of what route you take.
You can either: A) Order a firearm through us. **or** B) Buy a gun from one of many popular websites.
If you purchase the gun from us, we’ll call you once it’s delivered to us by our distributor.
If you buy it from a popular website such as AimSurplus, they will ship the firearm directly to us. Because it’s coming from an outside source, we charge a flat rate $25 “transfer fee”.
Once we schedule a time to pickup the firearm you’ll drive to Mansfield and we’ll begin the ATF paperwork, officially called “Form 4473”.
(Here’s a link to the form directly from the ATF website: https://www.atf.gov/file/61446/download)
Once the Form 4473 is completed we move on to the background check. The service, run by the FBI, is known as NICS, or National Instant Criminal Background Check System. NICBCS certainly doesn’t roll off the tongue like NICS does.
This NICS check may take under a minute, or it may take as long as 30 minutes to get a response. From there you’ll get one of three possible results: Proceed, Delay, or Deny.
—If you get a Proceed, you walk out that day with your new gun. It’s now time to head to the range and run a couple hundred rounds through your gun to make sure it’s 100% reliable with the ammo you plan on using.
—If you get a Delay, you’ll likely be heading home without your new gun. If your name is incredibly common such as Steve Smith or Juan Garcia, it’s likely that someone with a name similar to yours might have committed a crime at some point in the past and the FBI needs a little more time to make sure you’re not the other guy who robbed a zoo pharmacy in Florida in 1987. Updates to a delay usually take a few days, so we’ll call you when we get an updated status.
—If you get a Deny, you likely are the Florida man who robbed the zoo pharmacy while high on bath salts. NICS isn’t perfect, and they have made mistakes in the past, so there is an appeal process if you believe it is a mistaken identity.