Making our country a safer place

Making our country a safer place

GunTab is a unique business in the firearms industry. It can be appreciated by both sides of the political spectrum.

In the United States, there are essentially two camps when it comes to firearms.  Gun rights and gun control.  These two factions are notoriously at loggerheads.  But we think we have found something they can agree on.  Us.  That is to say, GunTab.

For the gun rights people, GunTab's benefits are obvious.  GunTab allows for safe, easy online transactions between strangers.  Without it, those transactions are much more dangerous and complicated.  GunTab effectively eliminates the threat of bait-and-switch schemes, stolen payments, identity theft, improper shipments, and accidentally illegal transactions.  It both enables and de-risks online transactions in a way that has never been done before.

For the gun control folks, those benefits don't matter much. These people don't buy or sell guns, so they probably don't care if transactions are safer and simpler. In fact, they might even want transactions to be more dangerous and difficult, simply to discourage them. For example, they might applaud the fact that every major payment platform (including PayPal, Square, and Venmo) prohibits firearm transactions. But that would be misguided.

Making it hard to pay for a firearm online does not prevent transactions. The difficulty simply drives people away from online deals, which generally require a background check, toward cash-paid local deals, which generally do not. It tends to increase the relative number of firearms changing hands between strangers meeting in living rooms, garages and parking lots. In other words, firearm prohibitions actually serve to encourage and normalize the anonymous cash transactions so many people worry about.

What's ironic is that many Americans involved in these anonymous cash transactions are uncomfortable with them too. Although rarely nefarious, these transactions still cause worry. Many buyers don't want to bring cash to meet someone with a gun and unknown intentions. Many sellers don't want to hand a deadly weapon to a total stranger. The buyer might want a receipt to show he paid for the firearm in full. The seller might want proof of sale to show he doesn't own the firearm anymore. These buyers and sellers want a safer way to conduct business.

GunTab fills the gap left by the firearm prohibitions of the major payment platforms. GunTab offers people a way to conduct firearm transactions online. That is something people want, for the same reasons as any other retail market. Buyers want better prices and selection. Sellers want access to more buyers. But GunTab's willingness to serve a taboo market has positive externalities for American society.

Every GunTab transaction involves a gun dealer with a Federal Firearms License (FFL). These dealers are legally obligated to perform a federal NICS background check on every purchaser. Further, these dealers are prohibited from selling to someone who appears to be an agent of someone else (a "straw purchase"). Also, they are usually both practically and ethically motivated to avoid transferring firearms to people who might abuse them. They know a $25 transfer fee is not worth either a lawsuit or a heavy conscience. We can rely on gun dealers to do their best to keep guns away from people who should not have them. So GunTab's dealer requirement helps to ensure people who should not own firearms cannot purchase them.

Further, every GunTab transaction involves multi-faceted scrutiny of the parties involved. While this scrutiny is designed to protect against fraud, it is useful for more than that.  In effect, GunTab's anti-fraud measures support gun dealers in weeding out suspicious persons and unwholesome transactions.

Basically, in empowering gun owners to do business online, GunTab is also helping to ensure firearms do not enter the wrong hands. That seems like a win-win scenario to us. We hope both sides agree.