Second Amendment Radicals, they want you to believe this is complicated.
It is not.
On May 8, 2026, the ATF published a proposed rule with a name only a GS-15 could love — Revising Non-Over-the-Counter Firearms Transaction Requirements, Docket ATF-2026-0266, RIN 1140-AB05 — and the comment window slammed shut on August 6. The idea underneath the bureaucratese is almost insultingly simple. If you live in the same state as a licensed dealer, that dealer could ingest your Form 4473 and perform your NICS check without you ever darkening their doorway, confirm you are you over a live video call layered in with a federal-standard ID verification, and then ship the gun to your house.
Amazon for peaceable gun owners, is the sales pitch for this rule.
The panic, of course, arrived on schedule. Anti-2A outfits treated this concept like the Second Coming of the mail-order Saturday Night Special. Someone take a crash cart to Lorcin! A few local shops — including ShootGTR in Gainesville, Florida, aka Worse Gainesville, thank you very much — went on the record sounding like they had their business destroyed. Public safety. Mental health. Straw purchases. The rent. The usual Fudd-adjacent whinging.
Here is the part they will not say out loud. Criminals already skip the paper trail. They do not set up a Zoom sesh with an FFL, hold their driver's license up to a webcam, smile for a liveness check, and wait for a NICS "proceed" like they are ordering a pizza. They steal, they send in their girl, they buy off the guy who knows a guy. The lawful customer is the one standing in your shop, filling out a form that should not exist, so you can collect thirty-five dollars and feel like you're fending off a resurrected Osama bin Laden.
This rule does not demolish NICS, unfortunately. It does not legalize interstate mail-order door-to-door handgun sales. It does not turn your shop into Palmetto State Armory overnight. What it does do, if it survives comment review, OMB, and the inevitable lawsuits, is give every in-state FFL a shot at the same direct-to-customer lane the big guys, the Brownells of the world, have been drooling over since the ATF reform package dropped. The shops that treat this like a funeral for the transfer fee revenue are going to get eaten. The shops that treat it like a storefront expansion are going to still be here to cater to the next generation of Second Amendment Radicals.
So let's do this properly. What the rule actually says. Why the "we need to look them in the eye" routine is Fuddlore. Why the economic freakout is real and also solvable. A sample tech stack a dusty-file-cabinet FFL can actually stand up, with numbers. Bitcoin that does not run through Coinbase to fend off de-banking. A security policy written for the guy who still keeps 4473s in a fireproof box and thinks "the cloud" is where weather happens.
Grab coffee. This one is for the shop owners who still like being in business, and for the customers who are tired of treating a civil right like a dentist appointment.
**Note: Just before we went to press, the Fifth Circuit ruled that the ban on direct interstate transfer of handguns is unconstitutional. This created a circuit split since the Second Circuit ruled the other way around. In theory, NOTC sales of handguns wouldn't need to be processed by an in-state dealer, which could expand the market for prepared FFLs considerably. Til guidance is issued, we're treating this as a "work in progress" and not factoring in this decision for the moment.
What the Rule Actually Does — and What It Very Loudly Does Not
Current federal rules already allow a narrow class of non-over-the-counter sales. Section 922(c) of the Gun Control Act has, for decades, let an in-state dealer ship to a customer who does not show up in person — but ATF's own regulation, 27 C.F.R. § 478.96, squeezed that lane down to NICS-exempt transfers. Permit holders in some states. Law enforcement purchases. The usual carve-outs. That is why a suppressor company can sometimes put a can on your porch and your local shop still makes you brave traffic for a GLOCK 19.
The May 8 proposal yanks that NICS-exempt limiter out. Same-state FFL, same-state buyer, the rest of the Brady apparatus still bolted on. The proposed workflow looks like this:
- You send the dealer a Form 4473 and a true copy of your government photo ID.
- The dealer gets on a live video conference, looks at the actual ID in your hand, and compares it to your face the same way they do in person.
- You also run through a Credential Service Provider that meets NIST SP 800-63-4 — Identity Assurance Level 2 for new customers, Authenticator Assurance Level 2 for returners. In English: validated ID plus biometric or live facial binding. ID.me is the name everyone knows. Persona, Jumio, and a handful of others play in the same federal sandbox.
- Only then does the dealer initiate the NICS or POC inquiry.
- The dealer still notifies the CLEO of the local PD, as with traditional (but rare) NOTC transfers. The proposal lets that notice go electronic instead to speed things up. The seven-day sit-and-wait after CLEO receipt is not a shiny new feature of this rule. It is leftover GCA machinery that has been sitting in 922(c) since the Johnson administration. The press keeps reporting it like ATF invented it last Tuesday. They did not. In theory this means the minute the CLEO notification hits the police inbox, the clock runs. Sidebar: this could be an ad-hoc registry...
- If NICS says proceed and the clock runs, the gun ships to your address.
Companion rulemaking on the same day would shrink and modernize Form 4473 itself, bless electronic forms and e-signatures more cleanly, and — in a separate docket — finally put electronic bound books and 4473 storage into regulation instead of a pile of variances and rulings. If you have been running FastBound or Orchid under an ATF blessing letter, that is the paperwork catching up to the year of our Lord 2026.
What it does not do:
- It does not legalize interstate direct-to-door for regular buyers. Out-of-state still goes to an FFL in your state. Palmetto in South Carolina cannot just do the new process and ship a weapon to a buyer direct in Florida. The gun still has to go to a Florida FFL, who then can do the NOTC dance. To be fair in this use case you may as well just do it the old way and pick up the gun in person. It's possible there will be a surge in stocking dealers for PSA.
- It does not dismantle any of the existing gun control apparatus, save for the buyer having to go to the FFL.
- It does not force any shop to offer remote sales. Participation is optional. That matters. The Fudds can keep the velvet rope. They just do not get to demand that everyone else keep it too.
- It is not a final rule. Comments closed August 6, 2026. ATF is chewing through the docket. A final rule, if it comes, is a late-2026 or 2027 problem, and someone in a blue state AG's office is already crafting a whiny lawsuit.
ATF's own pitch is that the Brady Act is from 1993 and the iPhone is not. Fair. The IRS and CBP have been doing remote identity proofing for years. The interesting question is not whether the technology works, it is how it will be implemented.
The Public Safety Panic: Your FFL Is Not a Cop and He Is Not a Therapist
On September 2, 2026, a reporter from the Independent Florida Alligator contacted ShootGTR — Gainesville Target Range, 1610 NW 65th Place, Gainesville, Florida — and came out with the quote that launched a thousand Fudd group chats.
Bennett Latimer, the operations manager, said there were "too many unanswered questions" to form a positive opinion. Then he said the quiet part:
"There have been a number of instances in my career where just having a conversation with the person, we’ve been able to prevent potential suicide attempts [for] individuals who were not in a good mental state."
A shop down the road compared remote sales to people cutting their own hair. James Pickett at Harry Beckwith Guns & Range called the inability to spot "red flags through a screen" a "dangerous path," and worried about young people's mental health and straw purchases you can supposedly clock when cash changes hands in the parking lot.
Ruminate on what these guys are saying for a minute.
An FFL is a federally licensed businessman or businesswoman. He or she is not a law enforcement officer. He or she is not a licensed clinician. He is not your priest, your parole officer, or the night nurse at the nuthouse. He is a guy who is allowed, under a license the government should not have the power to require, to sell you a product the Constitution already says you may keep and bear. The 4473 already asks the prohibited-person questions. NICS already queries the databases. If those systems cannot catch a prohibited person, the answer is not "make the customer stand in a showroom so a retail employee can play amateur psychologist." The answer is that the databases and the prohibited-person categories were always a civil-rights train wreck, and we should stop pretending a chat about the weather over an LE-trade in GLOCK 22 is a suicide-prevention program.
Also in case the FFL didn't notice, the Bruen decision prohibits "public safety" as an excuse for gun control - no more interest balancing.
Could a good counter guy notice someone in crisis? Sure. Good humans notice things. So can a good pastor, a good bartender, a good range safety officer, and a good friend. None of those people are a substitute for a constitutional default of yes, you may buy the gun. And none of them are a reason to kneecap lawful commerce because a subset of dealers have built an identity around being judge, jury and executioner when it comes to the Second Amendment.
The straw-purchase argument is the same movie with a different poster. Straw purchasers who intend to traffic do not generally enjoy the sunlight, surveillance video in a shop, and a 4473 with their real name on it. They use girlfriends, they use cousins, they use stolen IDs, or they skip the store entirely and steal. Heck, some gangs have informal caches of "throwaway guns". A Zoom call with liveness detection and a NIST IAL2 bind is not weaker than a tired Saturday clerk squinting at a beat up ID. In some ways it is stricter. The camera records. The CSP logs the data. The ID image lives with the 4473. That is a problem for privacy, which we will get to. It is not a problem for "we cannot assess the purchaser."
Bad actors do not expose themselves to a paper trail for sport. Law-abiding people do, because society has spent decades training them that this is the price of being good. When a shop frames that obedience as a public-safety sacrament, they are not protecting the community. They are protecting a workflow.
The correct community response to this flavor of Fudd is not a letter to the editor. It is the same thing Second Amendment Radicals do every time one of our own starts talking like Everytown with a range membership. Quote them. Screenshot the interview. Ask, in public, why a licensed dealer thinks he is a mobile crisis unit. Ask whether they run the same speech when a prohibited person passes NICS and the smell test because the Index never picked up their felony and they know how to schmooze. Hold the line. We do not outsource the Second Amendment to people who are afraid of their own customers.
The kicker here is that Bruen itself bans interest-balancing. An FFL should not be engaging in that, especially in a free-er state.
The Transfer-Fee Hangover: This One Is at Least Honest
The second objection at least has a smidge of honesty to it.
Right now, even if you price-shop a rifle on GunBroker or PSA, or Brownells and get it, the last mile is local. The gun lands at an FFL. You fill out the 4473. They run NICS or the state POC. They charge you twenty to fifty dollars, sometimes more if they are feeling bougie about it. Some shops — say it with us — literally make rent on transfer fees. They know, or they claim to know, that background checks are a prior restraint on a pre-existing right. They flinch anyway, because the landlord or the bank doesn't take payment in principles. QuickBooks doesn't put the business in the black on Constitutional grounds.
That fear is not imaginary. If a customer in your state can complete the 4473 from the kitchen table and take delivery at the door, a certain percentage of "I just need a transfer" traffic evaporates. Range-only shops and gunsmiths will feel it less. Pure transfer mills will feel it first, unless they are proactive. Big in-state players like Shoot Straight in Florida are already bolting together concepts. PSA is making inquiries with local FFLs to suss out a proper e-commerce platform and integrate with the PSA mothership.
Here is the part the flinchers skip. The rule does not ban you from charging for the remote work. Identity proofing costs money. Video time costs money. Packaging, insurance, and carrier firearms policies cost money. Compliance software costs money. You can price a remote transfer the same way you price an in-store transfer, or you can price a delivered rifle like a delivered refrigerator — product plus a documented fulfillment fee. You can also stop thinking of yourself as a last-mile locker and start thinking of yourself as a dealer who happens to have a website.
Palmetto, Guns.com, Brownells, GrabAGun, and the rest have been building that muscle for a decade. GrabAGun even told investors this spring they believe they are "uniquely positioned" if remote transfers and direct-to-home delivery land. That is the tell. The majors are not lobbying to kill this. They are staffing for it. If your plan is to stand in the parking lot and hope the future trips, the future will drive around you.
The ideologically correct move is also the commercially correct move. Keep the shop. Keep the range. Keep the face-to-face customers who want to shoulder a stock before they swipe a card. Keep the gun counter for those who don't want to wait 7 days plus delivery time and risk putting their name on an illegal local registry (YMMV depending on how trashy your local PD is) And stand up the remote lane so that when a guy two counties over wants the rifle you already have on the wall, he does not have to give that order to a warehouse in another time zone because he's slammed and can't make it to your shop.
How a Local FFL Plays in Palmetto's Sandbox
You do not need a 200,000-square-foot megawarehouse. You need a proper website, for starters.
The minimum viable remote FFL, if this rule is finalized in anything like its proposed form, looks like five jobs stacked on top of the license you already have:
- A real e-commerce website, not a Facebook photo album and a "call for price" caption.
- Electronic 4473 and bound-book software that can accept the remote option and an e-signature.
- A private room in which to do the live person process — all you likely need is your laptop and a door that locks.
- A credential-service integration that meets the NIST language in the rule.
- Shipping discipline.
Then you add payments that do not get you debanked, backups that survive a ransomware note, and a human who can tell a customer their NICS came back delayed without turning it into a sermon.
You already have the hard part. You have the FFL. The majors would kill for a licensed "landing pad" in every flyover market. You are sitting on one. Make those calls.
What follows is a sample stack for a hypothetical shop — call it a two-to-eight person FFL that does transfers, some used guns, and a modest new-gun counter. Numbers are 2026 street estimates, not a vendor pitch. The ATF, your lawyer, and your staff will have opinions. Be ready.
A Sample Technology Stack, With the Ugly Price Tags Attached
Storefront. WordPress plus WooCommerce on a US-hosted VPS remains the least-complex option for a firearms e-commerce website. Budget $20–$80 a month for competent hosting, plus $500–$1000 to have someone who has done this before set it up so you are not debugging PHP on a Saturday. Shopify is prettier and easier, but they are virulently anti-2A and some risk management intern could kill your site for laughs. If you already have a site, stop redesigning the logo and start putting inventory on it with real SKUs, real QOH, and real shipping classes. Tools like Grok will write product copy, FAQ pages, and "what happens after you click buy" explainers in an afternoon. Use them. We'll vouch for Grok since out of all the major frontier models, Grok is the least hostile to firearms content.
4473 and bound book. FastBound still starts around $9 a month on the low-acquisition tier and scales toward $99 as volume climbs, with the attorney-defense rider that makes compliance guys sleep happy. Orchid eBound has a $0 starter cap at very low volume and paid tiers in the $25–$99 range; their POS Spark bundle that folds in catalog and 4473 lives around $99 a month. BoundPro and a few others sit in the $29 neighborhood. You want electronic 4473 with remote packet intake, e-sign, ID image attachment, and an export that will not make an IOI call for armed backup. Paper 4473s in a cabinet can coexist during the transition. Do not bet the license on a spreadsheet named FINAL_final_4473s_USE_THIS_ONE.xlsx.
Video. Zoom Business is about $16–$21 per user per month and gives you recordings if your counsel says keep them. Google Meet is cheaper and uglier, and compliance is less plug-and-play. Self-hosted Jitsi on the same VPS is free except for your time and avoids risking another vendor that hates guns. Record the ID comparison. Store the recording with the 4473 packet. Treat it like a serialized firearm. Because legally, it is now part of the transfer file.
Identity proofing. The rule wants a CSP assessed to NIST IAL2, with live facial comparison or automated biometric comparison plus liveness. ID.me is the brand the federal government already trained half the country to hate-use for unemployment and the IRS. Persona is another option. Ballpark $1–$4 per successful proof, sometimes with monthly minimums. Returning customers under AAL2 can be cheaper — password plus 2FA — which is a gift if you stop treating every buyer like a stranger. Do not vibe-code this. If something breaks, you're on the hook, and you don't have the attorney budget a CSP does.
Payments, fiat. Assume Stripe and Square will have the vapors the first time a SKU says "pistol." High-risk merchant accounts through Authorize.net, NMI, USAePay, or a firearms-specialist processor typically land in the 3.5–5 percent plus thirty cents neighborhood, with rolling reserves if your underwriter is in a mood. You'll be in the same bucket as pornographers. Price it in. It's a sad cost of doing business.
Payments, Bitcoin. This is not something just to draw in terminally online weirdos from X. This is anti-debanking infrastructure. Run BTCPay Server on a $10–$30 VPS. Fee to BTCPay: zero. You self-custody. WooCommerce plugin is mature. Turn on Lightning so a $600 pistol does not cost eight dollars in on-chain fees and three confirmations. Do not route this through Coinbase Commerce or any KYC’d hosted processor that can freeze you because a compliance analyst in San Francisco decided he was going to pick on gun shops that day. If you cannot explain a seed phrase to your spouse, pay a competent nerd once and write the recovery procedure in the same binder as the alarm code.
Shipping. FedEx and UPS will sell you a firearms shipping program if you fill out their paperwork. Budget real money for declared-value insurance. Adult signatures on delivery. No porch-pirate "just leave it by the grill" nonsense. Record the box contents in your bound book the same day you hand it to the driver. If your state has a waiting period on top of the federal NOTC clock, your site should calculate that in public so you are not arguing with a guy who thought "in stock" meant "tomorrow." People don't mind slower shipping as long as you are truthful about the turnaround times. Don't forget tracking.
Rough monthly burn for a small shop that is serious:
| Piece | Low | Realistic |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting + domain + email | $25 | $80 |
| WooCommerce maintenance | $0 (you) | $150 (your Zoomer relative) |
| FastBound / Orchid / equivalent | $9 | $50–$99 |
| Zoom or equivalent | $0 (Meet/Jitsi) | $20 |
| CSP verifications | usage | $50–$200 at modest volume |
| BTCPay VPS | $10 | $30 |
| High-risk merchant account | % of sales | % of sales |
| Backups / password manager / 2FA | $10 | $30 |
That is not a Tesla payment. That is less than having the cleaning lady keep the shop sparkly.
The Security Bill Comes Due, and the ATF Just Got Hacked
In late August 2026, the ransomware crew Qilin put ATF data on a leak site. The Bureau called it a "major incident," insisted the box was a "standalone" system disconnected from eForms and the mothership, and then watched Qilin publish about 6.3 gigabytes of investigation files after the countdown expired — target suspect names, phone numbers, IP addresses, iCloud remnants, Cellebrite dumps, the sort of thing you do not want floating around a Russian-speaking extortion blog. We talked about that mess already. The short version for shop owners is simpler than the forensics.
If the agency that wants your bound book cannot keep its own toys in the crib, you do not get to pretend your new e-commerce server is "probably fine." Remote 4473s plus ID images plus video recordings plus customer addresses plus payment data is a piñata waiting to be smashed. Hostile actors — ransomware crews, anti-gun doxers, rogue governments, common thieves — have a motive to hit gun businesses. The ATF breach is a billboard. Act like you saw it.
More digital sales means more digital exhaust. That is good for customers who do not want to take off work. It is bad for customers if you store that exhaust like a teenager stores screenshots on their phone. The danger to the gun owner in this rule is not that a video 4473 is "less safe" than a counter 4473. The danger is that we are about to create a fatter, more portable pseudo-registry — CSP biometrics, ID copies, recorded faces, ship-to addresses — and hand pieces of it to vendors, clouds, and whomever could spear-phish your employees.
A Security Policy for the Guy Who Still Loves a Dusty File Cabinet
Write this on paper. Put it in the binder. Make everyone who touches the systems sign it. You may have to really dumb this down.
1. 2FA, always. Every login that can see a 4473, an ID image, a video, or a customer list uses a password manager and a hardware key or an authenticator app. SMS codes are a joke. If an employee will not use 2FA, they will not touch the systems. This is not optional. If a breach can be traced to you and not the provider, you'll be bankrupted in about an hour.
2. Least privilege, like the keys to the NFA vaults in your shop. The kid who prints shipping labels does not get superuser to anything. The accountant does not get the videos. You. The responsible person. One deputy in case you get hit by a bus. That is the admin list.
3. The cabinet still exists. Electronic 4473s get an encrypted backup every night, automatically, to a destination you control — an encrypted drive in the safe, a US-hosted backup service you actually pay for, ideally both. Test a restore twice a year. A backup you have never restored isn't a backup at all.
4. The internet is not your friend. Shop Wi-Fi for customers is a separate network. Your computers running the NOTC process don't double up as systems for the marketing department. Updates happen, get them out of the way. "I hate restarts" is not a control. If you are still on Windows 8 because the label printer "likes it", you'll get compromised.
5. Phishing is how they get you. Nobody clicks a link in an email that claims to be ATF, UPS, FastBound, or your processor without navigating to the site themselves. ATF will not ask you to "verify your bound book" from a Gmail address. Your bank will not ask you to "confirm a wire" in Slack. ID.me isn't going to request a meeting via Teams at random.
6. Vendors are strangers with a contract. CSP, video host, payment processor, hosting company — written agreement, US jurisdiction, no "we train AI on your 4473s" buried in page 47. If a vendor gets popped, you need to know what they had. Have your attorney review.
7. Video dies on a schedule. Keep what the rule and your counsel say you must keep. Delete the rest on purpose. Infinite retention becomes the registry we fight against every day.
8. When, not if. You will have a written one-page incident plan: who pulls the network cable, who calls the insurance and the lawyer, who tells customers if their data walked. Rehearse it once. You already rehearse a robbery. A hack is a robbery without guns.
9. Summon the pros. If this entire section felt like a foreign language, that's your clue to summon the geeks. There is a nephew, a counter kid, a customer's son, a range regular who works in the cyber industry. Pay him as a consultant. Give him a title so he cannot pretend it is a favor. Get him under contract. Outreach like this is a safeguard against using a potentially-hostile consulting firm that may just decide anti-2A warfare is part of their scope of work. There's a metric ton of qualified geeks in the 2A space that will gladly do the work, and be loyal to the cause.
NICS Is Still a Prior Restraint. Ship-to-Door Is Still Progress.
Let us not get house-trained.
The National Instant Check System is a permission slip issued by the same federal government that cannot keep its own data off a leak site. It criminalizes the act of transferring a firearm at retail (and in some states private) without asking the FBI first. It punishes people for names that collide. Bob Smith of 123 Main Street can be mistaken for Bob Smithee who is currently in jail for murder. Remember a NICS denial can be your death warrant.
It delays the woman seeking an adequate defensive tool who just left a bad situation because some police encounters pinged in CJIS or III. It has always been unconstitutional in spirit even when courts were too timid to say so, and "we made this Zoomer friendly" does not grant it any more legitimacy.
Hold that thought and hold this one at the same time: a world where a rifle is sold like a legally restricted but otherwise normal product — identity confirmed, paid for, delivered, recorded to the minimum the current statute demands — is a world closer to treating arms like arms instead of like radioactive waste that must be handed across a counter by the priestly caste. Mail-order firearms existed in this country. The 1968 Gun Control Act is the reason your grandfather's catalog from the 1950s looks like science fiction. Every increment that makes the peaceable buyer have a more streamlined experience is ground we should take, even while we keep swinging at the underlying scheme.
That is how you future-proof a shop without becoming the regime's enforcer. You use the rule. You do not bless the underlying Constitutional
If this lands as written, a competent local FFL becomes the in-state last mile and the storefront. The majors will still have price and selection. You will have proximity, service, a range, and a face when something goes wrong. That is a business that can serve the same county for thirty years instead of dying on the vine because of Fuddlore.
Comments Are Closed. The Fight Moved.
The regulations.gov box on ATF-2026-0266 stopped taking input at 11:59 p.m. Eastern on August 6, 2026. If you were going to file a love letter or a protest, that train has left. Do not pretend otherwise.
What you can still do, as of mid-September 2026:
- Watch the docket and the Federal Register for a final rule, a supplemental notice, or a quietly hostile rewrite. Final action is the live fight now.
- Call your senators and your representative and say the quiet part to them: support a final rule that keeps same-state remote transfers lawful, and be ready to fight a Congressional Review Act attempt if a future Congress tries to kill it.
- If you are an FFL, send ATF's Office of Regulatory Affairs a professional letter anyway — ORA@atf.gov — describing how you would implement IAL2 without being crushed, and asking for a pre-cleared CSP list so small dealers are not guessing at NIST language. Late letters are not comments. They are industry input. Sometimes that still matters.
- Check your state. A federal NOTC lane does not pre-empt a state that already forbids mail-order or requires in-person licensure theater. If you are in the usual suspect states, this article likely does nothing for you.
- Vote with the screenshot. When a shop talks like ShootGTR, say so on X. You're part of a movement, and you have to hold all players accountable. Turn it around and if you are an FFL, put the hostile players on the spot and snipe their customers. If you're a customer, social media is your friend. Promote the good guys, mock the bad guys.
- If you are a customer, ask your local FFL — out loud, in the store — whether they plan to offer remote 4473s if the rule finalizes. The ones who sneer are giving you a signal. Take your business elsewhere.
NSSF called the broader May package the dawning of a new era. That is industry-speak, and it is not wrong.
"This is what ‘promises made, promises kept’ looks like. … This is more than turning the page on the weaponization of government against a lawful industry that provides the means for citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights. This is the dawning of a new era."
— Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF Senior Vice President and General Counsel, on the 34-rule ATF reform package that includes the NOTC proposal
A new era that still runs NICS is not the era we want. It is a milepost on the way to the new era we want.
Close the Binder. Open the Store.
The ATF proposed, on May 8, 2026, to let same-state dealers complete a 4473 and a NICS check with a video ID comparison and a NIST-grade credential proof, then ship the firearm to the buyer. Comments closed August 6. Anti-gunners hate it because anything that makes a lawful purchase less of a pilgrimage offends them. If they had their way, outside of a complete ban, they'd push for the South Korea model where the firearm would live at the police station.
A slice of local retail hates it because they either think they are cops or they think the transfer fee is a birthright. Both of those camps are wrong. Criminals are not waiting in your lobby. Therapists do not work the bound book. And the transfer-fee model was never a strategy — it was a habit.
The shops that survive will look like small versions of the big retailers they claim to be better than: a real site, electronic 4473s, a camera, a CSP, a high-risk credit processor, a BTCPay box that Coinbase cannot touch, and a security posture that assumes Qilin already has their hackers slamming your systems. Recruit the 2A geeks in your midst.
NICS remains a civil-rights insult. Direct-to-door, done by a local licensee who plans to still be here in twenty years, is how you treat a gun like a product without surrendering the argument. That is how a family shop serves a county for generations instead of becoming a footnote in someone else's warehouse.
Trust the shop that will ship. Not the one that needs you to genuflect.
note: I wrote this with the aid of Grok. Let me know what you think. With Grok I can output faster, but it may not seem like "me" as much. Without Grok, you get "me" but slower.
Note 2: Disclaimer: This is commentary, analysis, and speculation about a proposed ATF rule (Docket ATF-2026-0266 / RIN 1140-AB05) and related Form 4473 / electronic-records dockets. It is not legal advice, not tax advice, not IT-security advice, and not a promise that any vendor, processor, carrier, or credential service will work with your shop. RGG is not a law firm.
Federal firearms rules, state law, local ordinances, carrier policies, and payment-processor terms change, conflict, and get litigated. A same-state remote 4473 that is lawful on paper can still be a license problem if your state requires in-person theater, if your software is wrong, or if you ship before the clock the statute actually requires. If you hold an FFL, or you are about to spend money standing up a remote-sales stack, talk to a real firearms attorney who does this for a living — someone who will read the final rule, your state code, and your insurance policy — before you change how you transfer a single gun.
Nothing here is an instruction to evade NICS, skip a 4473, ship interstate to a non-licensee, or treat a proposed rule as if it were already in force. Comments on this docket closed August 6, 2026. Until ATF publishes a final rule, and until you have counsel sign off on your workflow, however you do business now is your workflow.
Get Yourself A Gun And Learn It
This is a firearms blog, so we're going to recommend guns. Of course don't forget other things like medical, comms, doing your Area Study, and so on. There's better sources than RGG on those topics, but for firepower, we have you covered.
Ideally you'll at least want either a basic rifle, i.e. an AR-15, or a pistol, i.e. a GLOCK 19, to start. Both are exceedingly common firearms with plenty of accessories, spare parts, training, and support. However, in some restricted areas, both an AR and a GLOCK are hard to get easily, and you may have to settle for a shotgun for quickly arming yourself. It beats a sharp stick. Note, the in-house counsel wants to remind you that we're talking the legal acquisition of guns here. We're still working on abolishing gun control, and we don't want you in jail. Unfortunately you'll have to play ball in this regard. But anyways, here are some basic suggestions for getting armed.
| Firearm | Cost | Buy Now |
|---|---|---|
| Radical Firearms RF00028 AR-15 | $469 | Buy Now! |
| GLOCK 19 Gen6 9mm Pistol | $620 | Buy Now! |
| Mossberg 590 Shotgun | $621 | Buy Now! |
Learn how to make guns, as well.
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