Why your online ammo order comes to our counter

You ordered a case of 9mm from a website and the confirmation email says it is shipping to a gun shop in Medford. That is not a mistake, and it is not the retailer being difficult.

In New York, a commercial ammunition sale has to go through a licensed firearms dealer or a registered seller of ammunition, and the transfer has to happen in person. The statute is Penal Law 400.03, and the language is about as plain as statutes get: no commercial transfer of ammunition takes place unless a licensed dealer or registered seller acts as the intermediary, and the transfer between seller and buyer must occur face to face.

So there is no version of a commercial ammunition purchase that ends with a box on your porch. The online retailer ships to a dealer; you finish the sale at that dealer’s counter.

Any national retailer advertising ammunition shipped to your door in all 50 states is either routing New York orders to a dealer or not shipping here at all. Read the fine print before you check out, because a fair number of them will happily take a New York order and then cancel it a week later.

Before the ammunition changes hands at the counter, an eligibility check runs against the state’s database, and the dealer keeps records of the sale. The current specifics — what you need to bring, what the state charges, how long it takes — are set by state procedure and they have changed before. Ask us, or check the New York State Police site. We are not going to publish a procedure here that could be out of date by the time you read it.

The reason people order ammunition online is the sticker price. Then it arrives at a counter anyway, and the real total looks like this:

For two or three boxes of range ammunition, that total is essentially never lower than buying it off a shelf. The break-even point on most common calibers is somewhere up around a full case, and even there it is closer than the advertised price suggests.

Where online genuinely wins is volume in a caliber a local shop does not stock deeply, or a specific match or hunting load nobody carries. That is a real reason to order. Cheaper 9mm usually is not.

Before you order, it is worth knowing what is already twenty minutes away. We stock case quantities and box quantities in the common practice calibers — 9mm, .223 and 5.56, .45 ACP, .38 Special, .300 Blackout, 7.62x39, .22 LR — from Magtech, Sellier & Bellot, Prvi Partizan, PMC, Armscor, Fiocchi and Federal, among others. We also keep clay target loads by the 250-round case from Challenger, Clever, Fiocchi and Rio, which is how the trap and skeet shooters buy them.

And we carry the odd stuff. If you own something in 8mm Mauser, 6.5x52 Carcano, 7.5 French, .303 British, 7.62x25 Tokarev or .38 S&W, there is a decent chance we have a box for it on the shelf right now — which is not something you will find at a big-box store, and not something worth paying shipping for.

Current pricing and stock is on the website, and the counter will always tell you the truth faster than a search will.

Ammunition in New York goes through a counter. That is the law, it applies to every dealer equally, and it is worth factoring into the price before you click buy rather than after. If the goal is cheap practice ammunition, walk in and ask what is moving — the answer is often a case of something good that never appears in a search result.

Long Island Gun Source, Medford, NY. Nothing here is legal advice; for the current rules, go to the New York State Police.