I’ve purchased a few firearms online, and contrary to Dem talking points, they do not show up on your doorstep in a nondescript box. They must be shipped to a FederalFirearms License (FFL) holder recognized by the seller. You must then go to the FFL to complete a Federal Firearms background check.
Relate: Sununu Signs HB1178 – An ACT Prohibiting Enforcement of the Feds Anti-Gun Laws, But Does it Matter?
The FFL runs the details through the appropriate legal channels, and if you pass the check, you pay them for their time and trouble and get to leave with your purchase. If not, you leave empty-handed.
Just like you would at a gun store.
It is heavily regulated, but recent changes in how UPS and FedEx require firearms or parts to be shipped have eighteen State AGs (including New Hampshire’s) asking: Did a Federal Agency ask you to do this?
From the letter:
In recent weeks, several Montanans who hold Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs) have reached out to my office with concerns about your company’s updated policies. Specifically, they allege that the new regulations allow your company to track firearm sales with unprecedented specificity and bypass warrant requirements to share that information with federal agencies. …
Perhaps most concerning, your policies allegedly allow FedEx to “comply with requests from applicable law enforcement or other governmental authorities” even when those requests are “inconsistent or contrary to any applicable law, rule, regulation, or order.” In doing so you—perhaps inadvertently—give federal agencies a workaround to federal law, which has long prevented federal agencies from using gun sales to create gun registries.
You can read both letters here.
From Fox Business.
Knudsen and the other state AGs are calling on the companies to clarify whether the new policies were enacted with the “goal of information sharing with the ATF or any other federal agency;” if the policies were enacted at the request of a federal agency; and to name the federal agency if the policies were enacted at the request of the federal government.
…
State attorneys general who signed one or both letters include Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
If you’d like my opinion, and if you didn’t, you would not be reading this, the Feds “asked” or encouraged, and both carriers said yes, and here’s why.
There is no reason to add all the additional hassle required to manage additional shipping accounts at a single vendor location. I’ve worked for UPS as an unloader, loader, and driver, and supervisor, and we use both carriers where I work. I’m familiar. Adding these layers of opportunity for failure is not moving at the speed of business. It’s more like moving at the speed (and added expense) of Government.
Adding extra accounts based on the shipment contents runs contrary to the very nature of how UPS and FedEx try to innovate. It’s backward, and no one with any sense does that unless there is force or incentive.
The government, on the other hand, doesn’t care about efficiency or expense, so it makes sense that the ATF or someone inside the Federal Government encouraged this, and eighteen AGs can smell the rat.
Whether either carrier will come clean remains to be seen, as does what the AGs, including my own, intend to do about it (if something’s up) other than sign a letter.
