Ammo

Times have sure changed! When I was sixteen I went into Winters Hardware in my little Nebraska hometown and made a down payment on a shotgun. I wanted it for hunting in the fall so Mr. Winters held it for me all summer and I made payments on it from the money I made working my tail off in the hay fields. A couple of years later I bought a .22 caliber handgun without any background check or waiting period or even any forms to fill out. When I was in high school my hunting parners and I would meet early in the morning with thermos bottles filled with hot coffee. We stopped at the bakery on the way out of town and picked up a bag of sweet rolls, fresh and hot right out of the oven. We would either go to our duckblind on the North Platte River or to any of a number of corn fields or tree rows to hunt pheasants. When it came time to go to school we made a mad dash - usually getting there just moments before the bell - and stashed our guns and boots and gear in the trunk of our cars in the school parking lot. Then when the last bell rang in the afternoon we dashed to our cars and headed back out to get in some more hunting.

Times have sure changed!

Imagine a sixteen year old buying a shotgun or an eighteen year old buying a handgun or high school students with guns in the trunks of their cars in the school parking lot.

When we bought Dunsmuir Hardware back in 1975 the Federal Firearms License kind of came with the store. Licenses were easy to get and there were several of them in town, held by people who dealt in guns as a sideline business or hobby. One by one those licenses have been given up as the regulations and requirements and expenses involved have increased. Now we have the only Federal Firearms License in Dunsmuir and one of a very few in the whole county. There have been many times when frustration with those regulations and requirements and expenses made us give serious thought to giving up our license but we've held onto it. We know that if we ever gave it up we could never get it back.

We don't carry an inventory of guns - that does terrible things to insurance rates and the Department of Justice has strict requirements for storing guns that would be hard for us to meet. We do special orders for guns for customers - rifles, shotguns and handguns. We have an assortment of gun accessories such as cleaning supplies, holsters, and targets, and we stock ammunition as you can see in the photo. We are licensed by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. We are certified by the State of California Department of Justice. We process the transfer of firearms between private parties, between other dealers and private parties, and of course the sale of firearms by us. It's a tangle of red tape with forms and requirements and waiting periods and background checks and we do our best to make the process fairly painless.

It's an interesting facet of our business that we enjoy.