No problem Napsac… it’s nice to be able to use/ share the info I had to cram into my head over the years
As the manager, shutting down sales was my sole responsibility. I had a kind of a don’t ask/ don’t tell policy. My issue with federal paperwork (and legal stuff in general) is that you have to enforce the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law. If someone told me outright that their address didn’t match (or whatever), I would shut the sale down. I didn’t always want to, but at the end of the day the company was paying me to enforce the ATF rules as well as our store policies. However, for something like that, I would file the voided 4473 as was required by law, but I wouldn’t put any kind of warning in our system for that customer, and there is no legal requirement to do so. If they came back the next day, filled out the paperwork correctly, and didn’t set off any red flags… well lets just say I have a terrible memory and wouldn’t remember them at all. I was particularly forgetful if they chose to include their SSN on the 4473… that to me said they weren’t trying to hide anything.
We had a way of flagging names as NFP (no future purchases) or RF (red flag- not necessarily banned but we were going to shut down any attempted sales for anything we could possibly find), but I only did that if we shut down a sale with evidence or suspicion of illegal intentions. For sketchy attempted sales, we would also mark the gun that they were trying to buy so that we could keep an eye out for the person sending a straw purchaser in in their place. We took that very seriously.
I personally believe in doing my part to keep guns out of the hands of “bad guys†but not punishing college kids who use their mom’s addresses or bad spellers who recently moved to a house on Caloosahatchee River rd. I think most sellers are the same way.
You can get around being banned at particularly strict stores by the way you handle it. If the seller is reviewing your paperwork and says your address doesn’t match your driver license and you respond with “Oh, I wasn’t aware it had to. I will go to the DMV and update this to my new address and come back when my license is correctedâ€, there is no reason to flag you. If you say “Oh, I’ll change the paperwork to match what my license saysâ€, that will be seen as you admitting that you are going to lie on the paperwork, which can’t be overlooked.
I hope that helps! Obviously this is just my personal experiences, but maybe it will shed some light on what sellers generally do and don’t see as serious issues on 4473s.