You bought a gun online. What happens next.
Your gun does not ship to your house. It ships to us. What an FFL transfer actually is, what stalls one, and what to do before you click buy.
You found the gun you wanted on a website, you paid for it, and the checkout asked for an FFL. Then the confusion starts.
Here is the whole thing in one sentence: a firearm bought from an out-of-state seller cannot be shipped to your house. It ships to a licensed dealer, and you complete the purchase there. That is federal law, not a shop policy and not a New York quirk — it works the same way in every state.
What follows is what actually happens, in order.
Pick the dealer before you pay
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that causes every delay. Most sellers will not ship until they have the receiving dealer’s license on file. Some want it emailed directly from the dealer rather than uploaded by the buyer.
So: call or email us first, tell us where you are buying from, and we will send our FFL to that seller. It takes a few minutes. If you buy first and sort the dealer out afterward, your gun sits in someone’s shipping department while emails go back and forth.
Also worth confirming before you pay: that the firearm is one we can lawfully transfer to you in New York. Plenty of things sold freely on a national website cannot be transferred here. Ask before the money moves, not after — a seller’s return policy on a gun that cannot be delivered is rarely generous.
The box arrives
It comes to us, not to you, and it does not get handed across the counter off the delivery cart. We log it into our bound book, open it, and check the firearm against the packing slip — make, model, serial. If the serial does not match the paperwork, or the gun arrived damaged, we would rather find that on our bench than after you have signed for it.
Then we call you. If we have not called, it has not arrived, or it arrived with a problem.
At the counter
You will complete the federal paperwork and the checks New York requires. What exactly you need to bring depends on the type of firearm, on your license, and on your county — and it is not the same for a shotgun as it is for a handgun.
We are not going to publish a checklist here, because that is precisely the kind of detail that changes and that people find three years later through a search result. Call us and we will tell you exactly what to bring for your situation. For the authoritative version, the New York State Police firearms pages are the place to start, and for handguns, your county licensing bureau — for us, the Suffolk County Pistol License Bureau.
What the transfer fee covers
Receiving a firearm on our license is not a favor; it is a regulated act with a permanent paper trail attached to our business. The fee covers logging it in, verifying it, storing it securely until you can come in, running the required checks, and the recordkeeping that stays with us for as long as we are open. It is the same work whether the gun cost three hundred dollars or three thousand.
Things that stall a transfer
- The seller shipped without our license on file. Now it is here and unaccounted for on their end. Fixable, slower.
- The gun cannot lawfully be transferred in New York. It goes back. See above.
- The buyer’s name does not match the order. The person who takes possession has to be the person who bought it.
- Buying for someone else. You cannot have a firearm shipped to us and then hand it to a third party. Filling out the federal form as the buyer when the gun is really for another person is a straw purchase, it is a felony, and there is no version of it we will participate in. If you want to buy a gun as a gift, come talk to us — there are lawful ways to do it, and we will walk you through them.
Ammunition is a separate rule
If you also ordered ammunition, that is governed by different law and it comes to a counter too. We wrote that one up separately — the short version is that in New York a commercial ammunition sale has to go through a dealer, in person.
Ask first. Always.
Every difficult transfer we have handled started with someone paying before asking. A two-minute phone call ahead of checkout prevents essentially all of it, and it costs nothing. We would much rather answer a question about a gun you have not bought yet than explain why the one you did buy has to go back.
Long Island Gun Source, Medford, NY. Call before you check out. Nothing here is legal advice.