We believe that most gun owners in America want to be responsible. Every responsible gun owner wants to have safe transactions.
A while back Randall Gorham set out to sell an AR-15 pistol on a local classifieds website. A buyer contacted him, they negotiated a price, and determined a place to meet. Little did Gorham know, however, that his buyer was Sketch McSketcherson of Sketchtown. As soon as he saw the guy he knew he was up to no good, but what could he do? The sale had already been negotiated. After that exchange, Gorham knew he had to create a better way for responsible gun owners to safely sell their guns. So he and his cofounder Stephen Anderson started GunTransfer.
40% of gun sales are private party transactions and the type of sale criminals are most likely to exploit in order to get a gun. Few criminals will walk into a gun dealership and walk out with a firearm, but they can feasibly engage in a private party transaction and obtain a weapon. This not only poses a threat to society, but also a liability to gun sellers who face up to ten years in prison if they are found to have knowingly sold a firearm to a felon. It’s a system that needs to change, but despite all the political back and forth between both sides of the issue, there have not been any practical solutions presented that could trigger (forgive my choice of words) that change. Until now. “We believe that most gun owners in America want to be responsible,” Anderson says. “Every responsible gun owner wants to have safe transactions.” GunTransfer gives responsible gun owners the tools they need to make their transactions easier and safe while still protecting the privacy of both buyers and sellers.
GunTransfer offers three products, and even though gun laws across states vary greatly, at least one of those three products will facilitate a legal gun transfer in the state where you live. The first product, Basic Gun Transfer, requires that the buyer and seller live in the same state. Basic Gun Transfer helps the buyer and seller to arrange a meetup and creates a digital bill of sale. The second product, Full Gun Transfer, conducts a background check so thorough that the technology will detect if the buyer ever so much as stole a candy bar. Just kidding. But the system will discover if the buyer has anything in his/her history that should prevent them from owning a firearm, all while keeping the buyer’s personal details anonymous to the seller. Instead of the green check that indicates a buyer is clean, the seller will instead see a “do not proceed” warning. The final product, Safe Location Transfer, allows gun owners to sell their firearms with licensed dealers. Safe Location Transfer is legal in all fifty states and legal for across-state sales.
Gorham and Anderson expect to meet their Indiegogo campaign goal and launch GunTransfer in July.
In the interest of remaining your ever reliable narrator, I should probably tell you that I wasn’t sure what to think of GunTransfer prior to my conversation with Anderson. Saying I don’t care for guns is like saying Voldemort doesn’t care for Harry and his friends, and my ideas for what we should do with guns are similar to He Who Shall Not Be Named’s ideas for dealing with The Order of the Phoenix. Have I lost you? I was kind of hoping if I turned this into a Harry Potter thing the comments section might be a little less…terrifying. My point is, Anderson and I are of two very different minds on this issue, yet we both agree GunTransfer is a solution that can make a big impact for the better and satisfy, at least to some extent, both parties. Agreeing is something I think both sides need to do more of if we want to actually prevent scary people from doing scary things with scary guns. “We’re a pro gun private company,” Anderson explains. “However, the fact is, there is a problem with gun crimes.” GunTransfer helps reduce the gun crime problem while actually making the transfer of guns easier for owners. “As a gun owner it’s my responsibility to keep guns from people with bad intentions,” Anderson says. GunTransfer is giving him the tools to do just that.
Published 2/11/2016
