The statehouse in Olympia in 2023 was abuzz with flurries of meetings and activities, testimonies and impassioned speeches. Fresh off their easy victory in the previous year to ban all magazines over 10 rounds – that law headlining three gun restriction bills – Democrats in the state congress wanted more.
And this time, they came after AR-15s and Washington state FFL carriers.
The first was well outlined in the previous article in this five-part series, a sweeping ban to remove Washingtonians’ access to semi-automatic “assault rifles,” so called.
The less flashy, but altogether more dangerous, legislation, though, targeted not the guns, but those with license to sell guns. FFL stands for Federal Firearms License and is a licensure required by the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) for proprietors of gun or sporting goods stores to carry, sell, and distribute firearms legally in the United States.
Such stores – especially the kind that focus solely on the sale and distribution of firearms – have been given the moniker of FFL as a shorthand way of saying “gun store.” The distinction is important because these FFL’s act as the gateway in states for citizens to purchase guns.
Maintaining their federal license allows these locations to carry inventory as well as submit background checks required by federal law. This may seem onerous and confusing considering the second amendment right to keep and bear arms without infringement, but according to at least one FFL owner, the federal oversight is necessary in his business.
Jeremy Ball, owner of Sharp Shooting Indoor Range and Gun Store in Spokane, Washington, said that there will always be a need for some sort of oversight when it comes to selling firearms.
“Unfortunately there are still human beings involved and that’s the problem, people are dysfunctional,” he said. “We absolutely need oversight. All industries need oversight. But instead of oversight being there to get rid of you – there’s a difference between the oversight trying to rid the industry of people vs. working with the people for them to become compliant. And I think that’s where we have gone wrong.”
Having served for several years as the gun store’s general manager before taking over as the owner, Ball said that he has gone through several years of ATF audits. And for many years, he added, those audits were done objectively and with the purpose of making the shop compliant with federal regulations that were well documented and consistent.
“Those turned out to be coaching sessions in a lot of cases,” said Ball. “In some cases they were strong coaching sessions… They were not without consequences, but they were with the objective reasoning that the federal agency would do anything it could to get in compliance because it’s better for the community when we have that.”
Nationally, since the Obama administration (2009 - 2016) then ramped up during the Biden years (2021 - 2024), there was an evolution to the process that turned openly antagonistic and hostile toward FFL’s. Gone were the coaching sessions and the goals of compliance, now there are zero-tolerance policies and a never-ending process of moving the goalposts.
“Instead of objectively ridding the world of FFL’s that made mistakes and should have lost their licenses for egregious things, they started focusing on dealers who made mistakes inadvertently.”
The changing climate around gun shop oversight in the 2010’s and into the 20’s, made for fertile ground in a rampantly increasing progressivism in Washington state.
Supercharged with the emotions swirling around events like Parkland, Las Vegas, Uvalde, and (locally) the Freeman high school shooting, state legislators teamed up with citizen activists and well-funded lobbyists to take multiple shots at FFL’s. Their weapon of choice: senate and house bills aimed at regulating all gun sellers out of existence. The leverage they use to drum up financial support and public outcry is the idea that state FFL’s make up a lawless segment of the populace where criminals and would-be murderers are given unfettered access to firearms.
“This is not the wild wild west,” Ball countered. “There is an extreme amount of regulation around this industry, and a ton of oversight. The percentage of people that do nefarious things in this industry that are issued FFL’s and make mistakes, or voluntarily do illegal acts, is about the same percentage of the population that do bad things as police officers. It’s an extremely microscopic percentage of the world.”
That reality, though, does not seem to matter to those in charge of Congress in Olympia. This is clearly seen when one looks at the ever-encroaching list of regulations passed year after year. There does not seem to be a goal or an objective to be reached, but only to exact punishment against a convenient scapegoat.
The first big reach in 2023 was Senate Bill 5078 that passed easily in the congress and was signed into law by Jay Inslee. That bill allowed people to bring lawsuits against FFL’s as well as gun manufacturers if the guns they built or sold were used in a criminal act.
The big argument for the passage of this bill was the entirely emotional appeal that someone should be made to pay financially for the tragic loss of innocent life. Bizarrely, in a state that has outlawed capital punishment and actively released violent criminals during the “summer of love” in 2020, public opinion held that justice must be served — but not against the actual perpetrator. Instead, accountability would fall on the third party who made or sold the weapon, regardless of whether the buyer was the one who used it in the crime. And it would be financial. Millions of dollars in financial punishments.
Not satisfied, the members of congress in Olympia came back for more last year, introducing House Bill 2118, which was the FFL Killer bill that many in the industry feared was coming. With a requirement for annual background checks for employees for FFL’s with more than $1K in annual sales, a requirement to carry $1 million in liability insurance, as well as mandatory updates for security and surveillance, even the Seattle Times labeled this as bordering on enacting punishments on legal businesses for merely existing.
“Basically over the last several years, Washington FFL’s have dropped by half.” said Austin Johnson, host of Mid-Tier Thoughts, a podcast discussing guns, gun rights, and encouraging citizens to use and maintain their second amendment rights. “Most gun shops are not an extremely profitable business. They get by. And in a store like Sharp Shooters, where I used to work, the estimated cost was an extra $300,000. And that would have to be installed within six months of the bill going through.”
The current legislative session pushed forward a piggy-back bill that further codifies the requirements of last year’s bill. But at this point, it might as well be poking a dead horse with a stick. There isn’t much left to be done. The time to act, said Ball, was yesterday.
Even if these bills were not the business killers that they were intended to be, even if some gun stores can or could absorb the excessive financial burdens that these laws have created, there are still a myriad of other hoops and requirements that make the possibility of successfully selling firearms smaller and smaller each year.
Washington, in 2023, enacted its own state-sanctioned background checks for firearms purchases, that was to be run concurrently with the federal checks through ATF. The problem with this was that federal law does not allow for secondary checks, and the state checks carried with them a 10-day waiting period that is not allowed federally.
“You’ve got Washington state FFL’s that are not able to follow the law,” Johnson summarized.
And more than that, with the state checks being done by state law-enforcement agencies instead of the ATF, the system simply couldn’t handle the requests pouring in daily. The gridlock caused Washington FFL’s to have to keep firearms on their premises because delays in the state checks exceeded the 30-day allotment to complete them, voiding sales.
This conundrum became even worse when Washington’s AR-15 weapon’s ban went into effect and FFL’s were left with dozens or hundreds of these now illegal firearms in stock with no way to offload them.
“You’ve got Washington state FFL’s that are not able to follow the law,” - Austin Johnson, Mid-Tier Thoughts
To think that these moves were anything less than coordinated or intentional is asking for a suspension of disbelief beyond most rational, thinking people.
And the coordination, according to Ball, is to break down the wall of protections that FFL’s afford to the citizens trying to purchase firearms. Once the wall is broken, there is nothing to hold back the state from essentially banning all firearms from future generations.
Now that these laws are set to go into effect this summer, what is the track that Ball and other FFL’s have taken? Agreeing with Johnson, Ball believes that once this takes place, upwards of 70% of the industry in Washington state will be forced to close.
For his part, Ball and his company have filed suit against the state of Washington and are attempting to repeal the onerous regulations that have been leveled against them. He says that in one day, the day the “assault weapons ban” went into effect, he lost 35% of his business. But the assault against his company and others like him is ongoing.
And it isn’t over. The legislature is against them. The courts have seemingly no incentive to move their cases forward. But Ball and his fellow combatants in this industry have taken to other means, like family safety education and changing the narrative around guns to revert to the healthy and positive association of past generations.
In the meantime, understanding that such efforts will take generations, the FFL’s in Washington are dug in for the long haul.
“The courts don’t move the way they want them to,” said Ball. “But we have to go through the process. If we don’t follow the laws, we’re no better than anyone else who breaks the law. We need to understand this is going to be a long fight.”
***This is Part 3 of a full-spectrum review of Washington’s assault on gun rights. Click here for Part 1 and here for Part 2. And stay tuned for part 4 which will take a look at the money funding the war against guns in Washington state.***
