Still don't know why a NH dealer won't ship a handgun to MA. if the MA ffl is ok with it, what is the issue? Maybe I'm ignorant...lol
Is there liability there as well? Or is it just a matter of not wanting to deal with the "perceived" aggravation?
There is no perceived aggravation, it's real. When you have people who are dumber than a box of rocks (like most MA gun buyers are) and can't fight their way out of a paper bag, the remote then has to absorb the agita/costs of a bounced transfer when the buyer FAILED to do their homework. (which probably happens 9 times out of 10).
Let's say a guy walks into my shop. I'm joe typical NH gun shop owner that only knows a little about MA law but I normally don't have to conern myself with it too much. I have a bunch of handguns for sale. A guy comes in and says:
"hay can I buy dat I am from MA"
"Do you have a dealer in MA I can transfer it to? I can't sell handguns directly to MA residents."
"Yeah my budday in marlburrah runs pudlickers gun shop, I buy stuff all the time hed probably transfer it in no problem"
"Are you sure about that?"
"Yeah he's cool, never had trouble there, been doing business with him for years. "
Sounds legit, so I take the guys money. Guy buys gun. Gives me the number/etc for pudlickers, Leaves store, and I get ready to transfer it to pudlicker's.
Now, 3 things can happen.
1. I call up pudlickers to do the inbound and it turns out that the owner is an
******* and absolutely refuses to do an inbound transfer. Now I'm stuck here with a gun that this guy paid for that I can't sell to anyone else until I call back the buyer to tell him it failed and give him his money back. I just wasted an hour of my time (or whatever it took) to bounce the sale and draft a check or issue a credit to the guys credit card. Lost opportunity cost of not being able to sell that handgun for whatever interval of time between when it was sold and when I went to go send it to pudlickers. Fail.
2. I call up pudlickers and the guy is rude but more or less tells me "just to send it down and hes faxing over a copy of his FFL and to just fax him one. Ok fine, I do that, he does that in reverse. I mail him the gun. Then pudlickers receives it. Then the rude bastard at pudlickers calls me and goes OH MY GAWD I CANT TRWANSFAH THIS TO HIM ITS NOT MASS COMPLYAINT ZOMG WHADDYA TRYIN TO DO
****FACE GET ME THROWN IN JAYLE???" *hold phone away from ear while rude bastard rambles on and on about mindless compliance bullshit* "Ok, sir, just send it back to me please. I'll cover the cost of shipping". That's like 2 hours wasted, DAYS of opportunity cost. Money wasted on shipping. I can't wail the customer with a restock fee because then he'll be running his mouth on the internet about how badly I treated him, blah blah blah, etc.
(ETA: There are about THIRTY variations of this #2 scenario, but for brevity's sake I'm not going to get into them all here, but the end result part of it is always exactly the same. )
3. Pudlickers swaps FFLs with me and gleefully accepts the transfer and doesn't bitch, transfer goes fine. Nothing dramatic happens.
Out of these three, the third one is the LEAST LIKELY to happen.
Now I know what you're saying- Well you could have called puclickers when he was in the store! Maybe. Maybe the guy that works there doesn't answer the phone. Maybe, because I'm joe typical FFL, I'm not expecting any kind of problem doing a transfer because 99% of all transfers are pretty much flawless victories, easy crap to do. (Remember as an NH FFL there are like 45 other states that are easy to send handguns in and out of, and MA is one of the 5 that aren't. )
So, to revisit... as an NH FFL, unless you're parterned with an MA FFL to do inbounds and you both know the score.... (and you've had "the talk" about what is or isn't acceptable to send) it's a shitty business proposition to send guns into MA,. the land where gun dealers have to operate off of rules that are best described as coming out of the byzantine empire.
Summary Version: Read the OPs rant.
Summary Response: "This is why we can't have nice things."
What the OP has posted is THE EXACT REASON why NH dealers will not send stuff down here, even if it is clean. Whiners always cost dealers money. The reason has very little to do with the law itself. It's administrative
problems!
-Mike