When my dad passed away in January, he left me a number of things including quite a few guns - mostly hunting rifles, but a few hand guns as well. I have zero use for them, so I was wondering how I go about selling them legally. I'm more than willing to go to a dealer, but I just don't want to stand on the street corner and go, "Pssst...hey, buddy, wanna buy a shotgun?" Any thoughts?
There's a lot of paperwork involved if you want to be a "dealer" in the strictest sense but you can always consign them at a gunstore although you probably won't get rid of them all for a while if you go that route. Or maybe Gunshows?
Yeah, I don't want to be a dealer. I just want to sell them. It's not like he had 100 or something. We're talking maybe 15-20 total. I just want to make sure I'm getting rid of them legally.
You don't have to do anything to sell a gun legally. You can post them in the classifieds. You just want to make sure you get copies of their driver's license and get them to sign a sale slip just in case a crime is committed with the gun so you can prove you sold it to someone. If you want to do it more formally, you can do it through a dealer and they normally charge you about 50 bucks and they keep all the records.
If you sell them to a 'gun store' the usual rate is that they will give you 50% of what they will resell them for. You can do better. Sell them on Gunbroker.com, which is owned by eBay. And person-to-person transactions within the same state are absolutely 100% legal. You can't sell person-to-person across state lines. If you sell on gunbroker, the buyer will have to get a transfer dealer and you will ship to the dealer, who will give the guns to the buyer. If you need help identifying exactly what you have, or need help with the exact details of the process to remain legal, I can do that. I have a federal firearms license.
Just FYI, I got all of them and there are a couple 35's (one old one and one fairly new and in good shape), a nickel plated Walther PPK (what the hell, dad, were you James Bond?), a .22 handgun and one other decent name handgun I can't recall right off the top of my head. There are also 3 nice hunting rifles (no shotguns) all with scopes and a couple of cool pellet guns (there's a pellet pistol as well). He had quite a bit of ammo as well. I like the idea of going through a broker - particularly someone like GunBroker.com - because I don't want to deal with the paperwork. I've also checked in with some police officer friends to get their suggestions. Thanks for the suggestions here.
