6 years ago, I began a 3 year job at a gun store (I posted a lot of my stories from there on the old "dumbest things overheard at the gun store" thread). My first direct manager, whom I'll call "Scott" was, well, what you think of when you think of your stereotypical gun store guy. Matter of fact, he was basically what the anti-gunners think of when they think of every gun owner: Cocky, aggressive, ignorant, rude, unsafe with his guns, and very racist (HATED black and Hispanic people). He also loved to play fast and loose with just about every regulation you can imagine.

The store originally had a rule that employees could buy anything from the store at cost, and this included used guns. So, whenever a customer sold the store a used gun, if Scott wanted it, he'd just take the gun for himself, pay the store back whatever was paid out to the customer, and never even put the gun into inventory. He justified this by pointing out that there was nothing in the company handbook that required us to put any inventory out for sale, so he was doing nothing wrong. But here's where it gets really murky: If it was a long gun, he would never even enter it into the store's logbook or do a 4473. He claimed that because he immediately paid the store back and there was no paperwork specifying that the gun was possessed by the company, he technically conducted a private transfer between himself and the customer, thus meaning that he didn't need to do any paperwork.

Scott was eventually fired for a laundry list of things, some of which were somewhat related to this, but not directly. I was just taking a trip down memory line recently and this whole thing popped into my mind. Out of curiosity, despite Scott claiming that what he was doing was "perfectly legal", was there any law broken here? None of the customers were ever aware of what he was doing; they were always under the impression that they were selling to the store, and didn't know that they were taking part in a "private transfer". The fact that he was misrepresenting the actual buyer of the firearm seems awfully shady to me. Thoughts?