Buying an AR-15 is as easy as visiting your local gun dealer and getting a background check. Buying a firearm from its current owner is even easier. A machine gun, however, is far from an impulse buy: The paperwork can take months, with many hurdles along the way that can stop the process.
Machine gun buyers have to go through a local, federally licensed dealer who must first take delivery, charging a fee of up to $200. Such dealers are required to fill out paperwork transferring the weapon to them and submit it to the ATF. “That paperwork is everything,” Joy Goepfert says. “That is the license for the gun. That gun really is not valuable without that paperwork.”
Barring any mistakes, that initial process can take as long as a month. Once complete, Frank Goepfert says, the buyer has to make an appointment with local law enforcement and fill out a fingerprint card for submission to the ATF. Additionally, the buyer needs to fill out a certificate of compliance. After that, a buyer has to show up again at the local gun dealer, fill out further paperwork, pay the $200 transfer tax, and ship the whole file to the ATF. Upon receipt, the agency will begin a background check and examine the paperwork. This process can take six months.
In some cases, these machine guns aren’t fired by their new owners—or even taken out of their cases. A few never even reach the buyer, staying in the dealer’s hands until the price appreciates enough to sell it. Machine guns serve purely as an investment tool for anyone willing to endure the requisite bureaucratic obstacles—an extreme version of requirements gun law advocates seek for more common types of firearms.
Eventually—unless the statutes controlling machine guns change—legal sales will become increasingly rare as their numbers inexorably shrink over time. In the meantime, those still circulating will likely keep getting more valuable.(Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, is a donor to groups that support gun control, including Everytown for Gun Safety.)
— With assistance by Mira Rojanasakul
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.