When Goepfert switches from purchaser to salesman, his job falls somewhere between gun dealer, money manager and antiquities expert.
“We work with a lot of buyers that, you know—they’ll tell us what they’re wanting to collect or invest in and then we go out and try to actually locate a good quality item for them,” he says. “So we work with them and kind of coach them a lot of times.” In addition to making sure the desired firearm is in stock, Goepfert says will pull its price history so a buyer has an idea of what kind of return they will see.
In the past, the machine gun industry saw upticks in sales when the stock market experienced a downturn. “I’ve actually had people pull out of the stock market or real estate when that was going on, and they’ll say, ‘I want to put my money in something different, something a little bit safer,’” he says. “They might not invest $1 million in machine guns, but part of their investment will probably go there.” One exception was when the price of oil tanked. Midwest Tactical experienced a slide in sales, he says, because many of his clients work in the energy sector.
Goepfert didn’t set out to become the king of machine gun collectors. He just didn’t want to work for anyone else. “We really had no money—he couldn’t keep a job,” recalls Joy, who started dating Frank when they were teenagers sharing a high school locker. Eventually, he took up landscaping and built his own business, then tired of the physically demanding work. Looking around for something else, Frank turned to machine guns.
At first, he just wanted to own one. So in 2005, he looked into how he could get his hands on a machine gun legally—specifically his preferred firearm, an AC556, referred to by aficionados as the “buzzsaw.” It wasn’t easy, but it was worth the trouble, Goepfert says. A few weeks after buying it, someone offered him $1,000 more than he had paid.
At about the same time, he was pursuing another firearms-related hobby: building silencers, though he ultimately exited that market because it was too time-consuming. There was a residual benefit, though. “It kind of helped me develop a network,” he says. By 2008, when the financial crisis hit, Goepfert was cleaning out dealers who were closing up shop and developing relationships with older collectors looking to part with their guns. “We would have people call that they were hit by the recession, maybe they lost their job or business wasn’t as good as it had been, so they’d want to sell their machine guns” Goepfert says.
Recognizing how much care the guns require, Goepfert says he rarely makes purchases that require repairs. Very old guns are often left untouched by his staff of six, since changing them in any way could decrease their value. Some are so delicate that the act of firing them could cause damage.
Goepfert had carved out a profitable niche—one that would become much more lucrative when he started marketing his guns on the internet. His websites are now the first Google result for machine gun sales, and his business is a top 10 seller on Gun Broker, the nation’s largest online firearms auction marketplace. Midwest Tactical recently purchased SubGuns.com, a forum and classified-listing website, which Goepfert operates alongside MachineGunCentral.com. The web now generates 99 percent of Midwest Tactical’s sales, he says.
The ATF defines a machine gun as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” Actual machine guns rarely figure in criminal acts, in part because buying one is such a burdensome, expensive and paperwork-heavy process.The National Firearms Act of 1934 slapped a $200 transfer tax on them, the equivalent of $3,773 in 2018 dollars. In addition to machine guns, the act regulated silencers and shotguns with barrels less than 18 inches long. Then came the Gun Control Act of 1968, which further expanded thedefinition of a machine gun. About two decades later, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act effectively banned newly manufactured machine guns from being purchased by civilians at all.
Since then, machine guns that can be sold legally are referred to as transferrable, meaning they were previously registered with the National Firearm Registration and Transfer Record, according to the ATF. Machine guns that weren’t registered—but should have been—are illegal to possess.