Kesselrings Losing FFL

Seems to me like they are getting off easy from ATFE and are likely to get hit by IRS also.
It would be interesting to see what dates they purchased the guns that have no sales paperwork. If that is over their entire span of doing business I could understand a large number of 50+ year old records being missing. It sounds like there are current problems also, but it may well be that the majority of those "missing" guns went missing before the current managers were alive. That may explain why 1000 of them were in employee hands(almost all employees are family members according to the article). Grand dad took inventory home as Christmas presents decades ago and never told anyone it wasn't off the books.
 
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You can bandy this back and forth all you want and place blame and make excesses for Kesselrings.
The bottom line this is bad news for the gun community.
This is the crap that helps get unreasonable laws passed that drive up the cost of doing business which translates to higher prices.
It is also the type of poor business practices that make gun shops and gun owners look very lazy and oblivious to the laws that govern our sport.
I would be willing to bet there is not a guns sales retailer out there that does not have some sort of tracking and accounting issue related to firearms sales.
Any way you twist this, the reproductions from this could come home to haunt us in a very bad way.
 
You'd have to ask one of the FFL's that post on here, but I remember hearing somewhere they only have to retain the records for 20 years. And Granddad wouldn't have had records to maintain anyway, he was before all this.
 
It's astounding to me that anyone would try to defend this, or down play the significance.

I don't care if it's guns. What if they average "widget" sells for $350 and there's no government over-sight whatsoever. What kind of business is OK with "losing" $360,000 worth of product over ANY amount of time? We're not talking about an 1/10 ounce of cheese on the floor when you make a pizza and it adds up to a bunch of money over many years. This would be like losing ENTIRE PIZZAS for no reason whatsoever and nobody knows why or how.

When it IS guns and everybody KNOWS there's a manure spreader load of government over-sight, what kind of fool lets their business be run so poorly that they just "lose" $350,000 or more worth of product that they KNOW the government wants tracked?
 
Employees who steal are criminals.
Employees who steal firearms are now armed criminals.
Some types of inventory control is just more serious than others.
 
johnwilliamson062 said:
It would be interesting to see what dates they purchased the guns that have no sales paperwork. If that is over their entire span of doing business I could understand a large number of 50+ year old records being missing. It sounds like there are current problems also, but it may well be that the majority of those "missing" guns went missing before the current managers were alive. That may explain why 1000 of them were in employee hands(almost all employees are family members according to the article). Grand dad took inventory home as Christmas presents decades ago and never told anyone it wasn't off the books.
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The requirement for the records dates to the Gun Control Act of 1968, so the requirement is 46 years old. I have a cousin who owned a gun shop when the law was enacted. His shop was much smaller than Kesselrings, and he was fully aware at the time of what the requirements were for keeping records. I recall discussing it with him back then. He wasn't happy about it, but he understood the requirement and he understood that it was the law.

I find it "incredible" (in the literal sense of the word) that the owners and employees of an operation the size and scale of Kesselrings somehow did not understand the legal requirements.
 
Ranting about how the GCA of '68 shouldn't be the law doesn't change the fact that it IS the law.

When I worked in a shop we periodically did our own inspections and if there was a gun that didn't have every last I dotted and T crossed, somebody got a top priority assignment to fix things and they did nothing else until it was done.

I don't care how much business you're doing there's no excuse for losing 2300 guns. Even if a thousand of them turn up in employees homes, they're still unaccounted for. They had a chance to clean up their act. They should have taken it.
 
I am sorry to see any business go belly up. But in this case, I really can not blame the economy, the laws or anything except the business owners.

They had to be aware of the laws. A friend owns a local pawnshop and like Natman said, anything found to be amiss during their own reviews of the paperwork is justification to dedicate a single employee to address the problem ASAP until it is corrected and then training is accomplished to ensure it is addressed to all employees.

When you play with a handgrenade, you need to make sure there are plans in place if you lose the pin. These folks where given a warning, more than once, and still chose to ignore it.
 
our Gov't agencies also guilty

While poor record keeping by this stores management doesn't excuse their actions, most of our gov't law enforcement agencies are also guilty of this same offense. There are thousands of unaccounted-for firearms that can't be found in the FBI, ATF, CIA and IRS, to this very day. It seems that our gov't can play by different rules than its citizens. This shouldn't be but it is an obnoxious and unreasonable fact.
 
Government exempts itself from all sorts of laws. Remember the syringes and needles that washed up on the Jersey shore? That incident produced laws requiring documentation of proper disposal of needles and syringes that are a significant operating cost for doctors, hospitals, dentists, and veterinarians. You have to buy a box, pay to dispose of the box, keep written records of the box's disposal, have a written training plan for teaching your employees to put stuff in the box, buy a license for the box, and pay for an inspector to check your box and your plan and your license and all the other aforementioned crap.

Those laws exempt US government agencies, even though those Jersey shore syringes and needles were eventually traced back to the US Navy. I still pay almost as much to dispose of used needles and syringes in my practice as I do to purchase their replacements. It's a law, and law abiding people abide by the law.
 
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