Aside from the random gun bans, policy also made it way more expensive to sell parts. When you have to check PALs for misc parts, it increases the cost to do business.
0 additional time for a checkout turns into 2-5 minutes. Not just for guns mind you: mags, barrels, and slides all need a PAL check now.
Worst of all, it's for nothing. Most criminals just smuggle their guns in from the US and for the ones who are 3d printing them, these parts are still unregistered and not tracked.
Before we only needed to verify the license for firearms, which took a couple of minutes. Just type in the PAL info and it says valid / invalid and we would verify the name and address on file matched the order.
Now we need to do this for certain components, and for firearms also generate a "reference number" on the CFP site, record it along with the shipping info and firearm info, and keep that log for 20 years.
I'm curious, is there specific criteria for the format of the logs? This information is stored only by the retailer as I understand.
Say if a court were to subpoena the logs from retailers, are electronic ledgers in a certain format mandated by the government or can retailers use paper versions for example?
It's also a compounding issue in that if you have a manufacturer -> distributor -> dealer -> customer model of doing business, at each step the process for transferring is repeated.
As well, at the retail level it's really common for the pal verification to fail and needs more labor time to sort out. Usually someone just didn't enter their info properly, but also it's common for the site to just say you need to call in.
It's a needless burden when the old system was fine.
and the distributor isn't selling one 1 to a store
Actually that's really common, especially for the smaller stores.
I never said this is what put the store out of business. It's going to be a combination of things, but rising costs are an issue for many. Every little bit matters.
The gun bans removing desirable products, the shit economy reducing spending money, rising costs on goods, tariffs, excess bureaucracy, payment processors refusing to do business with gun stores, rising insurance premiums.... It's a death by a thousand cuts for a lot of the gun shops that have gone out of business in the past couple years.
100%. Remember a lot of retailers have two sides, brick and mortar and online. You essentially need an additional employee on deck to handle the checks (i.e. more money spent) or you use an existing employee which ties up their time and costs you more money because you are potentially serving less customers per hour which means less sales per hour.
Online sales are always running. So when people are making purchases for small items that now require pal verification after hours/closed days as soon as they come into the store someone now has to spend time running all that information vs actually working the floor/counter. God forbid system is down, or there is a typo in how a customer inputted their information - that compounds the time spent.
I've also seen this issue in the brick and mortar store. What used to be in a walk-in-and-pay is now a walk-in-and-wait because you need an attendant to actually run the check.
Presuming your staff are paid $20/hour, those 5 minutes add less than a percent to specific orders, and not to all orders.
You're assuming everything goes smoothly. The amount of times I've personally seen as well as had many lgs tell me how they can't verify a PAL because the buyer doesn't have the right email set up? And that's in person. Imagine going through a list of things from an off-hour online order and now you are going back and forth playing telephone/email tag with a customer.
We aren't saying the verification is the main contributor to the issues stores are having but i think you are understating how much these things can affect your day-to-day when it happens multiple times a day.
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u/thehuntinggearguy 3gun, Mapleseed, YouTuber, SlamFire Radio, Revolver-hater Apr 21 '26
Aside from the random gun bans, policy also made it way more expensive to sell parts. When you have to check PALs for misc parts, it increases the cost to do business.