Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey folks Rob McNealy here. And today we’re talking to John Bocker. He is the co founder of FFL Consultants out of Colorado, and they specialize in helping the gun industry actually be compliant. So, John, how are you today?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Great, Rob. Hey, thanks for inviting me.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, you know, I appreciate talking to you. I know you’re super, super busy, and especially with the state of the gun economy right now, it seems a little crazy. But I think we can jump into that in a second. But before we get into that, tell me a little bit about you. How did you get into this space? And what is an ffl? consultant? And what does an ffl consultant do?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Well, if anyone’s inside of the firearms industry, everyone knows the ffl is the Federal Firearms license that the ATF actually issues to gun dealers and manufacturers and distributors inside the United States to actually manage and manufacture and sell firearms. As I tell our clients for the government, the government is not allowed to do that and enter into commerce with firearms, so a licensed gun dealers, around the Americans, you do that for them. So we got into it, JC is a john clock, my partner in this business, we’ve been working with the National Shooting Sports Foundation for about eight years. And typically, we would be at SHOT Show and talking to audiences of about 200 at a time about different things they can do to secure and protect their guns against burglary, and how to deal with how to deal with straw sales and how to maintain that compliance so that they, as we say, stay out of hot water with the ATF just do things right. And one thing led to another and we realized there was a whole nother you know, arena of gun dealers out there beyond the nssf members. So we we started ffl consultants about three years ago, and now We service the entire firearms industry.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So how did you get so experienced with the compliance of this sector? It sounds like it’s pretty involved.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
And I get that question a lot so that everyone wants to know, where do you go to school for this? Well, you really don’t go to school, you can come into this business a couple of different ways. You can come in through the government sector, which is working for the ATF for years and working in and around the the regulatory compliance that the ATF imposes and the government imposes. Or you can come from the private sector. And that’s what JC and I did. At one time, I ran compliance for galleon sporting goods. And at any given time, we had 85,000 firearms in stock. We saw over 300,000 firearms a year. I mean, it was a it was a significant company, and that company was purchased by Dick’s Sporting Goods years ago. And then JC did this basically the same thing for sport, the Sports Authority for many, many years. So we’re very versed in the everything from importation to license acquisition, to compliance, security, sales and operations and inventory control. And, you know, we’ve JC and I have both been in the risk management business for companies since college. So JC has a little bit of military and law enforcement background. I’ve been in the private sector for about 20 2030 years, just maintaining compliance for companies and as we say, keeping them out of trouble. So it all evolved into this nssf program. Like I said, about eight years ago, were asked to start that up for them, and just turned into my full time gig.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what are the kind of problems that you see, or at least the common problems that a lot of you know, new ffl? Or even maybe some of the old ones? What do you think they where do they start running into that hot water? What are the things that are they doing that they what are the common mistakes they make?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Every every year the ATF actually puts out a list of the Top 10 issues that they are violations that they see in the management and control the firearms from their auditing programs, and from their results that their field inspectors actually report. But you know, it does change by year. And we see it more so recently in not only demographic but the startup ffl versus, you know, 20 year ffl. And but Rob dancy a question I want to say it probably comes down to training and turnover in every ffl. The laws don’t change that much in the forms, you know, the changing this form this year, the forms changing and as of November 1, but the 40 form 4473 which is the firearm transfer record. That doesn’t really change but once every four years if and if it gets revised and if there’s reason for it to be changed, because it’s a major overhaul a major I want to say process. For every gun dealer to convert to a new form, and train that folks, but what we see is newer gun dealers having a biggest struggle getting up and running, and understanding the very complex, what we call the ffl. guidebook issued by the ATF, it’s 263 pages of laws, regulations, and statutes that, you know, new, a person new in the business has to absorb, digest, understand, and then apply. And there’s little nuances to do. And each one of those right and wrong, there’s a lot of exceptions to the rules, they have to, you know, understand and possibly call your ATF agent about, or just continue reading and asking, you know, veteran ffl, or someone like us, you know, how do I do this? So we always say, you know, your first place to start is with the ATF. But if you don’t want to call the ATF and ask a question, that’s, that’s what the nssf and ffl ffl consultants is all about. We’re there to answer the question, we give real answers fast. And that’s what a gun dealer needs, you know, when they’re selling guns and managing inventory,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Is there like a school or like an orientation program offered by the ATF for these new FFLs?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Not so much any type, of course, or school or, but they do, you know, and that’s where we were actually involved with them as the nssf experts and consultants, we actually were traveling with the ATF and the FBI, every year conducting what we call regional workshops. And I want to say that’s the closest thing to any type of training that the ATF or the FBI in the next division will actually provide. There’s not much if anything available online is not many video or, or training tools online that you would expect from, you know, a perform process such as this. So that’s where we come into, you know, that’s what we’ve started to develop, because we know there’s such a need for that to occur. And it’s the only way really to keep, you know, people on the straight and narrow and doing things right, and getting up and running when they’re new to the business when the new to the business.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So right now, at least from what I’m seeing, it seems like the gun world is a little busy right now?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
That’s an understatement. Yeah, so this is, you know, the fourth going into the fourth quarter of 2020. And we’ve seen more firearm sales in the last six months than we have in, you know, in any in any six month period, actually, in the history since the a test been keeping track since 1968. We’ve had over 8 million firearms sold in since since March of 2020, a stat breaking all records and for a variety of reasons. It’s just not, you know, someone says Well, why? And I say, well, it’s just not COVID. It’s just not the election. It’s just not civil unrest. But I think it’s a combination, depending on where you live and who you are. It’s a combination of a few of those elements that are just, you know, causing people to turn to a firearm for personal safety. And the other interesting fact is this is the first time that we’ve seen such a just an astounding number of first time gun buyers. And when we were getting that information through our dealers or dealer networks and surveys we’ve been conducting, but we’ve seen and it’s a little bit scary because you want training to go along with all those new firearm purchases. But for the first time, we’ve seen an overwhelming number of first time gun buyers, and in states where we haven’t seen high gun sales before.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So with all these guns being sold, it sounds like you know, gun dealers are pretty busy. Do you see a lot of mistakes happening because of that just with like another you know, the paperwork side of things and the inventory management side of things.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
I want to say yes or no. Again, it depends on which who the dealer is how you have someone who’s spiked in business, maybe they were selling 10 guns a week 10 firearms, and now they’re selling 50 to 100. Just because of the run on on firearms and the supply and demand issues. We have firearm dealers we have clients all over the country from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington. But we have everything in between and we’re getting calls from the strangest from the strangest gun dealers and the strangest places but the strangest questions. An example would be you know, customers are some states are running out of firearms, basically, high population, low density of gun dealers, you’re gonna sell out pretty fast. So someone who someone who wants a firearm may have to travel 50 to 100, even 200 miles to actually pick to purchase the firearm they want. So we’re getting a lot of out of state purchasing requests and questions about clarification. There’s a lot of state regulations that that supersede the federal regulation. So you know, a gun dealer in Mississippi, for example, might call us with a question about someone from Louisiana or even Georgia coming over to purchase a firearm in this state. And that is restrictions on long guns versus handguns. There’s restrictions on magazine capacity. Types of firearms for certain states. So it’s caused a little bit of confusion. So on the gun purchasing side, we’re seeing a lot of confusion with out of state residents coming into buying it in a different state where they don’t live. So that that just leads to the paperwork, compliance issues. Am I doing paperwork correctly? Am I legally selling his firearm to those other people that aren’t my regular local customers? So we’re getting a lot of those questions. And that’s probably the greatest area where we’re finding compliance issues. Then it was a big because of the overwhelming number of firearms been purchased. You know, it’s put a real strain on the FBI background checks program, which is commonly known as Nix. And there’s one point back in April and even into May, though it delays the firearms of the next verification division of the FBI was, was backlogged maybe two, three, or even four weeks in getting an answer a determination to some of the firearms dealers for customers who are awaiting background checks. And there’s laws in place that say you can transport a firearm anyway. But there’s a lot of dealers who just don’t feel comfortable doing so. Yeah, typically, the law says you can, if the FBI doesn’t get back to you on a background check, you can transfer or sell that gun after three days, three business days. But a lot of gun dealers, you know, are more say, have more loyal to the constitution and safety aspect of selling and transferring guns, they don’t want to transfer a gun just because the law says they can. The law also says they don’t have to. So we were getting a lot of questions back during April and May about you know, what do I do? Do I have to transfer this firearm? Can I can I not transfer it? You know, because I don’t feel comfortable? I want to wait for your firm confirmation that they don’t have any background check problems. You know, and that was a big that we we were getting several calls for that about that question each week. But then we were we’re out visiting. Now, again, we’re doing an in store audit program, Rob, where we actually go into gun dealers. And we basically review all of their past transfers since the last inspection by the ATF just to make sure everything’s correct. And if we find issues, errors, we highlight them for correction. But you know, we’re finding errors all over the place from dates of birth, not correct. The wrong date, you know, you I’m supposed to put a date of birth on my transfer form, but I’m putting an expiration date on my ID was saying, you know, little technical clerical leprechaun, Clara, Clara’s administration error is not that they’re serious major problems with the gun transfer, but the clerical errors on the paperwork, all of those add up to violations with the ATF and they come to visit. So we try to claim that all up before the ATF next visit. So the gun dealer, we say passes with flying colors.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So I, I’ve talked to a lot of gun people and a lot of gun retailers. And there’s a lot of trepidation about the B ATF, in general among a lot of these guys. Do you see out in the field the be ATF being supportive and helpful? Or do you think they’re more adversarial when dealing with retailers?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Well, this is 2020. So if you asked me this question, 10 years ago, I might give you a different answer. But today, I want to say we were very we work very intimately with the not only Washington bureau, ATF office, folks, but we also deal with all more than 50 regional and local offices around the country, for the ATF. And I want to say that it was probably a change in regime over the last 10 or 15 years with new folks coming on a lot of retirees, you know, taking that option. And I want to say the ATF has a new perspective on support for their for their gun dealers. And I think it’s instead of the old gotcha type of scenario, which you might be referring to, I want to say that predominantly, I find that they all supportive. You know, when you do call the ATF, when I was answering the phone is going to try to give you the right answer or get someone to return your call your inquiry the same day. But they’re they’re a government agency. What I mean by that is they go into state fact versus fiction and eliminate opinion and not offer advice, but they will tell you where to go to find an answer. Make your own determination or interpretation of the law. And that’s that’s the I want to say that the gray area that we still find. It’s not like you can call the ATF office and ask a question and get advice. You can get an answer a firm answer based on statute, something that’s in writing something that’s a law. They’ll refer you to a process or procedure that’s already documented and issued publicly. But beyond that, you got to get to rely on your instincts, your opinions, your lawyers, your consultants, your sisters, your support team, your colleagues, maybe you’re part of a buying group where there’s a lot of ffl compensation. That’s the tough part is who do Who do you go to when you, first of all don’t want to go to the ATF. And second of all, you want more than just, you know, a black and white answer. That’s, that’s where we find a lot of our, our support being administered.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So with you with ffl consultants, where would your advice and maybe where would an attorney’s advice pick up from there? How do you work with that?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Great question. Great question. So we are not attorneys. And we stipulate that if you, if you work with us, we tell you that right up front, yeah, we base all of our knowledge on experience, practical experience, work practice, personal experience of being deposed and investigated and inspected, and now being training with the ATF and the FBI next team. You know, we see all sides of that JC and I and our consultants see what we call a 360 view of this business. So we can actually give you advice not only based on the legalities, but based on the business aspect of it profit and loss, you know, revenue generating perspective of what you’re doing as a gun dealer. But we have to, we have to draw a line when it comes to issues and situations of liability. And concern weathers the what if question, what if I do this, what if I do that, you know, we will give you our best experience and advice. But we will partner partner, you as a gun dealer with someone, we have attorneys around the country as well, we work very well with two of the very well known firearms attorney groups that are nationwide. So I pay to also have great relationships with the ATF. But we will with smart enough to stop at a certain point in giving advice, making a determination or proposing a decision and offering it up to one of our partner attorneys. You know, we of course, are insurance insured and bonded and have the right protection in place. But there’s limits to what we what risk we want to take on, especially when that firearm can impact someone else’s life, or be stolen and be involved in a crime, etc. So we want to be a little cautious in that area.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what do you see what like manufacturers? Do you see the different set of problems? Or do you work with manufacturers very much or more with the retailer side of things?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Manufacturers, most of the manufacturers have been around a while. So we do our work with new manufacturers standing out helping stand up the business on paying the licensing and insurance. And, you know, set up our operations and basically explain the foundational fundamentals of all of the acquisition and disposition record keeping the marking program, make sure they are congruent with the local ATF team so that they understand what they’re doing from the get go is, is 100% we’d rather spend a lot more a lot more time on the front end of a firearms, new firearms business, such as manufacturer and we have some ammunition manufacturers now we’re dealing with and some fellows who have moved from retail into manufacturing of AR type firearms and manufacturing kits into AR. So we have some minor manufacturing. So that’s what I’m talking about in this prior discussion. But on the line in a larger aspect, will it be browning or others and some of the major distributors, we find that they although we do support them through the National Shooting Sports Foundation, they typically have their own in house team of attorneys, compliance folks, people have been with them probably, you know, 510 15 years and or retired ATF folks who specialized in those areas. So we see less of that on our side. And most of our business and support goes to the retail gun dealer and the firearms range operators.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So it’s interesting politically out there. with things like the government changing its mind. Some things that come to mind would be say, for instance, the the recent bump stock ban signed by you know, Donald Trump, and I don’t know if you saw this even recently, but there is a thing with the honeybadger pistol, it’s a race issue. And it seems like sometimes ETF just shifts course, very, very quickly. What do you see? And how would you recommend that, you know, a retailer or something? How do they respond to that kind of shifting political landscape?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
We don’t see a lot of it, but obviously, I think any of it, you know, and a few of the two issues you mentioned obviously, and prior to that was magazine capacity bands, and different things. They what we do see of it, and I’ve been in this business, basically in the business for about 20 years since I you know, worked directly inside the firearms retail business. But we’ve been what we do on a daily basis, Rob is not only stay connected on a daily basis with the ATF open letters and rulings, but the nssf obviously is very intense. And then legal team and government relations team is very astute to what’s going on when it happens, whether it be at the state level, federal level. But I think I think historically, if you go back and look, there’s always an instance, where that sparks this change in demeanor or change in legislation or these these shoot from the hip restrictions, as we saw with the most recent one. But what we see is, if you go back and look at the incident that sparked the change, in statute, a ruling, whether it be a shooting in Las Vegas, or shooting at a school, or, you know, maybe there was a lawsuit in the news with, you know, a major retailer, and a shooting, that’s what we see, oh, is to be the issues that always catapulted this type of of item, you know, in the news. And the first thing, first of all, is to understand what the issue is. Secondly, if there’s an immediate notification, or if this is just something being spoken about, which most of them are, you know, it takes a long time for a bill to be introduced legislation to actually be approved and, and supported and voted on. And a lot of these bills, you know, Virginia just had an overhaul of their entire channel and less last year, I think they put five or six different new rules in place. The one we’re hearing about most across the country is the red flag laws with whether your firearm can be taken away from you for a variety of reasons. And that’s all based on states and municipality. So there’s a lot of rhetoric out there. But I think it’s important for a gun dealer to know what’s what’s impacting this state, you know, locally, are they in touch with their local legislators? Are they in touch with the senators and congressmen help them with some of the these these new call nuisance bills or legislative changes that are going into effect, you know, you really got to be connected, some of the best gun dealers and biggest gun dealers we deal with are connected, and have a direct line to their support legislator who can help them with some of the local laws. But when the ATF comes out with the honey badger, for example, this is this is making news for the last two or three days, everywhere yet, the the conversation is based on not based on anything specific xx except some wording that was used in a website, where the about a manuscript by the manufacturer that was maybe a little bit and probably could be edited or changed to resolve this issue in the description of the firearm itself. But the firearm itself was approved by the ATF design committee, design division, it was approved for manufacture as an AR pistol. So it’s very confusing to the the firearms industry yesterday and today, seeing all this news about it, and saying, you know, which end is up. So there’s obviously a lot of attorneys working fast, including NSSF, right now to figure out, you know, what the determination truly is before we run out and declare a million million firearms to be 100,000 firearms to be boating illegal in the hands of citizens illegally searches.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So tell me a little bit about that case, specifically, I saw an excerpt from a letter from the, you know, in the ATF, but it didn’t specifically state what the problem was. So I, you know, I don’t know what the actual problem was with the honey badger. What is the the issue they’re having with that?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Yeah, and I don’t have the I don’t have the website up. But basically, it was determined on their website that because, as I understand it, again, this is I’m not an attorney. As I understand it, this discussed we had this discussion this morning. And, you know, they might they might have built and manufactured and marketed this firearm as a military, they wanted this military, this firearm to be introduced and accepted as a military weapon to replace a very common automatic firing weapon that’s used by the military without mentioning names but long story short, it was not adopted, it was not. It was not adopted to replace the long standing current firearm that was being used. So the website basically advertised as honeybadger. It was an it’s an AR pistols what it is, it’s not fully automatic, it’s semi automatic. But they advertised that as a military weapon built for the military. And I think there’s someone got a hold of that, I don’t know. And they they ran us up, up some flagpole to get some backing behind the argument that it’s not a citizen. It’s not a non licensee, a citizen regulated firearm and it shouldn’t be and should be regulated by the NFA. Now that’s the general discussion that I was involved with as early as this morning. But technically, it has no other reason, because of the design of the firearm to declare to show up our rifle. You know, it’s got an arm brace just like every other approved AR pistol is able to have. It’s got a it’s a magazine fed. It’s a short barrel. But it’s not, it’s not a long gun. And anyway, and it’s not a rifle because the rifle is technically a firearm that has to be shot yet has a permanent shoulder stock on it. And as his shot is you can shoot with two hands. So this is a single hand operated firearm with an arm brace. So technically, it fits the description as as described before and as approved as an AR as a pistol. So this confusion, there’s a lot of confusion, I think within a week or two, there might be some more determination on this, but no one’s running real fast to know we also spending the deal is we are we are talking to or we’re advising him to suspend the sale of that firearm until we hear more about it. If there’s any, there’s some in stock, there are still some available. But the manufacturer has halted production of it and well, you know, it’s Q, I believe it’s in Utah, right. But based in Utah. So, you know, we’ll see what happens with this, but it’s fun to watch.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
It’s interesting. And it you know, I understand a lot of people have these braces. So I think that’s why there’s a lot of concern out there. And some of these braces are not cheap, like the maxim defense or the SP tactical braces are they’re pretty proud of them, those products, so it would be I think, devastating if those somehow became, you know, illegal contraband. Now, I mean, there was a lot of bump stocks out there, but I think there’s a whole lot more braces running around than there are bump stocks.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Well, yeah, and the brace itself is a legal accessory for, you know, a pistol, you know, and, you know, that’s as far as if you go back and look up, if you go to the ATF website and research this, you know, the arm brace is approved by the ATF to be attached to any pistol pistol, and they had an open letter in 2017, that even went on to expand the usage allowance to allow, you know, because there was all this, all these issues about people on YouTube and on video, you know, being shown or being seen using it as a shoulder brace, so to speak. So as long as it’s not designed to be used permanently as a shoulder brace, you know, or substitute stock for the firearm, it’s permitted. So, again, there’s a lot of gray area on this one, because there’s nothing new invented on this as an accessory on us on the honey badger to make it any more than what it is, which is an AR type pistol. That’s, again, my, my experience, in my opinion.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, this is why FFLs have to contact a guy like you to explain all that complicated nonsense and, and kind of diluted down and distill it down into something that like I said, Be distilling, not diluting. But distill it down into something simple, like a guy like me can understand all this bureaucracy and craziness.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Yeah, that’s all one thing, we get some panic calls, you know, when the bump stock ban went into place, and in some places they are bands have gotten into have been introduced and approved and made into law. I mean, I’m in Colorado, in Boulder, Colorado, outlawed ar, ar rifle, as of May 2019, a year over a year ago. And there was a surrender day either register it or move it out of the county if you if you reside in the county, and actually city limits, or register with the place or transfer it out or surrender it. And now, you know we get it. We were getting all these calls primarily from the dealers but also from a gun owners. You know, we’re on our website, wherever websites, so we get all types of calls, whether it be gun dealers, or people looking to buy guns or buying ammunition, or trying to license their firearm or whatever they might be doing. So but the interesting thing in Boulder, Colorado, Colorado, is he had a gun dealers had to worry about and no one else really did. I think and I think out of over 1300 estimated AR type rifles that they had in the county, just about 135 or registered. So it just goes to show that you know, some people are reacting, but some people aren’t. And there’s always gray area for discussion. And then there’s always the question of Well, what’s going to happen if I don’t, you know, so we get in the middle of all of it, you know, we don’t never disclose who would call him that we often call police department or they are the ATF or someone and ask the question on behalf of one of our clients. So someone calling, so it’s fun to be in the middle of it without being exposed, personally as to you know what the issue is, but firearms legislation, the laws, you know, are pretty straightforward on a federal level, it’s the state level you gotta worry about.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
It sounds like a lot of fun that they’re not your problems, in other words?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Yeah, most of them are my problems but but also services that help people with problems. So, you know, on any given day, you know, because of what we’ve done JC and I have been risk managers for large corporations and companies for almost 30 years each. So as I, as I tell people, I basically kept people out of trouble for all that time kept companies out of trouble and CEOs and but we also protected those businesses from from unnecessary liability. And we just didn’t want to incur the problem, you know, do things right, stay out of trouble and have no problems. And you never want an OSHA or the ATF or the IRS coming to peek in, you know, to look at your business, I mean, and it’s just a disruption and distraction when that occurs. And if you doing anything illegal, when they do show up, they’ll come they’ll look and leave. And that’s all goal is to is to help them do. Let’s do that.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So it seems to me like, or at least it sounds like what the retailer is that it seems like paperwork is the problem, like just keeping simple errors to a minimum would impact that a lot.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Oh, absolutely. And the biggest problem in a gun dealership right now is the human we call it the human factor, its people its turnover, training, a lack of training as new hires, there’s a lot of great software packages out and available now for gun dealers to do a couple things for and if you’ve been to a big box retail, like ballasts Academy, or a sportsman’s warehouse, you know, they’ll have you go up to the computer, laptop or the computer screen and fill out the 4473. And that eliminates the nice thing is it eliminates a lot of the human error issues that can be logged at the time at a transfer Can you know that way, it helps the gun dealer speed up the process. And you know, you don’t have to review the form three or four times you can let the software manage that for you. The software has built in controls and filters to make sure you put a date of birth, that’s that’s all of it an 18 years old for longer. And that’s all it and 21 years old for a handgun, those types of filters are really cool. And make sure every box gets filled in and make sure that you know the alternate the optional boxes are filled in with with hints and why it’s important to do that, like your social security number. It prevents the gun dealer from having an empty box and therefore having mistake itemized for them when they have the next ATF inspection. But then on also on the inventory side is great software for creating the databases for acquisitions and dispositions. And, and in most cases, if you if you buy more sophisticated software package, they’re linked. So if I sell a gun, my inventory is adjusted and a disposition occurs and a timing so good. So we do recommend when we find gun dealers with higher volume of transactions, or excessive training issues to implement some of these software packages. Of course they you know, they’re not free. The ATF does provide some free software that helps. But for the most part, it’s the training process, the paperwork process that is hard to harder to manage. And there’s lots of statutes about how long do I keep my form, how even a denials where it was somebody turned down for a gun transfer, I still have to keep it for five years. And we still get questions on what you know what to do with this paperwork in this type of transaction. Because some of it is just confusing. And not everybody can keep up when they’re running a business. You just can’t keep all of those answers. Top of Mind.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
That sounds a little crazy. I mean, we see that a lot in the crypto world to like. And in fact, at least in the gun world, there’s a lot more clarity like we already know what the rules are. In the crypto world, there’s a lot of lack of there’s a lot of I guess cloudiness, there’s not a lot of clarity. it because it’s so new blockchain and cryptocurrencies are such a new thing. Now, and I think that’s one of the things that is hurting the United States right now, a lot of these big crypto projects and blockchain projects are moving to other jurisdictions, because they don’t like the lack of guidance and clarity from the regulatory side from either than the CFTC, the IRS or the SEC in the United States. And so there’s a lot of stress there. And even with us with our test project, we focused very heavily over the last three years that we’ve been around on, you know, making sure we do our best to avoid, you know, regulatory risk as much as possible. But it’s so new and that, you know, you don’t necessarily know what you’re going to do something wrong, necessarily. And I think that’s it’s been interesting, you know, kind of in this space and at least in the gun world, you know, what the rules are, it’s pretty concrete. You know, the ATF changes its mind like you’re saying they let you know, they’re changing their mind. But right now it’s in you know, how this is what’s government paperwork, Number and regulatory enforcement is that the government’s not going to tell you if you’re if you did something, right, necessarily, they will tell you if you did something wrong, or they think you did something wrong, but they tell you, we’re not going to give you advice, you need to figure that out on your own. And then if you screw up, then they’re going to hammer you. And I think that’s actually not good governing in general. Especially if people are open and trying to do the right thing. They you know, if the government won’t tell you, this is not going to work if you do it, or this will work. And I think that’s a big problem. And it’s hopefully again, it gets figured out over time, because I think with these new financial technologies and and technologies that are coming around, I think that the United States should be able to be a leader in this space, and it is changing the world. But

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
You’re asking me all the questions. I want to dig into your stuff in just a bit. This whole crypto world is getting a lot of interest from gun to gun dealers, mostly the you know, the online gun dealers who are hearing about it, whether it be you know, Bitcoin or other type of cryptocurrency, and it being so new. I know it’s been around a while. But it’s still pretty new, especially with the firearms world where our business has been pretty, pretty normalized for the last 10 1520 years. And to your point, the laws have been around the law hasn’t changed much since 1968. With the Gun Control Act, it’s just like, as I said earlier, as some of the state laws that are confusing and challenging to keep up with, but um,

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well is what we’re trying to do is we we’ve created with TUSC, which stands for The Universal Settlement Coin, what we tried to do is we’re trying to solve a problem a payments problem, and a lot of people outside the gun world won’t necessarily know this. But in the gun world right now, lawfully regulated, heavily regulated, licensed gun dealers are having a real big time and a hard time with payments. And it’s not because of the loss, it’s because of a designation from politically active as banks have made it that the guns are treated like cannabis in prostitution and gambling. And so banks and financial institutions and third party payment providers don’t want to work with gun dealers and the ones that do want to take the risks charge a lot of basically a much higher fees for those services. And so with TUSC, we’re creating and have created a decentralized payment system. That is much cheaper than any credit cards out there. Right now, our network fee to the network is only half percent, and some of the gateway providers I think, will be adding 1% to that. So the idea is that instead of using a credit card that might be anywhere from three to 6%, depending on who you are, our network fees for every transactions only you can get the max, it’s gonna be as like a percent and a half. And then with a crypto payment scenario, you can’t be shut down. Right. So like a lot of

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Yeah, that’s a great glad to leading into this, because that is a question we get very often. And as you know, we’ve sent some folks away just to talk about this, like with credit card regulations, and the banking Institute’s you know, basically becoming, you know, non NIH supporters, non to a supporters rather, it’s very confusing to a gun deal and threatening actually right now as to what to do so. So stay on this topic for a minute what, what solutions is TUSC bringing in that regard?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So we’ve created TUSC It’s a cryptocurrency it’s a standalone crypto coin, kind of like Bitcoin. Everybody’s heard of Bitcoin, but we built TUSC for the gun industry. So we’re a bunch of passionate gun owners and gun builders and, and to a supporters. And we’ve been working on this project almost three years now. But we’re kind of we’re called a decentralized project. So that means that we’re kind of like a cross between a co op and a nonprofit. So no one owns TUSC. We’re not a for profit corporation. And the decisions about how TUSC is operated, are made by the members of the communities meaning that if you own a TUSC coin, you get to vote, you get to have a decision or a hand in the decision making on how TUSC is operated. So it’s it’s basically buy the gun people for the gun people. And the network itself. It’s pretty straightforward cryptocurrencies. Imagine, like a lot of people are familiar with how PayPal works. And but no one really understands how the back end of PayPal works, right? No one really understands how the back end of Venmo works and most people don’t care, right? They just want to have a payment solution. But right now in the gun industry, the banks who operate all those different Different types of Venmo and cash app and stripe and square and all those. They don’t allow gun retailers to use their systems, because of politics, it has nothing to do with legality. And so because they view is the gun industry is, you know, like prostitutes and gambling and hustlers and everything else, which we know is not true. But so what we’ve decided is said, you know, we watched in and as a group, we decided to try to solve that problem. Like right now, for instance, and I’ve talked to a lot of, you know, gun related people, is that there’s this whole, like, political debunking, and D monetization, you’re seeing that on the social platforms with Silicon Valley. You saw that with salesforce.com, you saw that was Shopify, these these CEOs are just activists, and they just basically write an open letter and say, if you’re under the gun world, we don’t like you, and you’re off our platform, they just say we’re not going to work with you. So the in essence, how we we solve the problem problems, one, we eliminate chargebacks, there’s no chargebacks with TUSC. So if you’re a custom gun builder, and someone’s impatient, they don’t want to wait for the gun to be built, they can’t charge you back on TUSC. Whereas with a credit card, can because they’re considered a red flag industry, they don’t get much of an appeal process when they have a chargeback. The other thing is TUSC helps on cash flow. So for instance, right now, if you accept the gun friendly credit card processing, processor, you still might have to wait anywhere from three to 14 days for that, you know, acth to hit your bank account. Well, with cryptocurrency it hits instantaneously hits their wallet, their crypto wallet, so if I bought a gun, or if I bought a gun from you, with TUSC, you would instantly two and a half seconds to three seconds later you have that cryptocurrency in your wallet, and you can verify that it’s there. It’s just as fast as credit cards. But you don’t have to wait for the bank to drop it into your checking account. And then on top of that, it’s like an insurance policy because we don’t have the ability to shut you off. So right now, and you’re seeing that right now, like especially a lot of mom and pops, you know, gun stores will set up a PayPal account, right, but they won’t do it in there, they’ll they’ll set up their business name like JC enterprises or whatever. And it’s a gun store. And PayPal work for a while Pay Pal were for a while, then bam, PayPal stops working and freezes their account. And once because PayPal has ways to figure out over time, if you are a gun dealer or an illicit business and they freeze your account. With cryptocurrency, we’re not a company, I have no ability to shut you down. It’s not even in the code doesn’t work like that. And so if even if I wanted to shut you down, and trust me, there’s some people I’d love to shut down, I don’t have the ability to shut you off. And I don’t own in any ways. I’m just a, you know, a member of the the co founder team, but I don’t control it. I’m not a CEO or anything. But the network isn’t designed to be shut down. So if you host all basically host a wallet on your own website, and you’re willing to accept TUSC, you have an insurance policy against being d platformed. In addition to it. So we always tell people look, you know, crypto is a new thing, right? This is new technology, there’s a lot of pieces, it’s got a little bit of a learning curve. But let’s just say you got a gun friendly crypto, or a gun friendly credit card processing account already set up on your website, you can download a plugin for TUSC, put it into your website, and it’s another backup payment method. So of some day, that credit card processor that was gun friendly decides to be not done friendly anymore. You can still be in business with TUSC. And we don’t have the ability to shut you down.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
So as a gun purchase as a firearm purchase, would I be able to go out and buy I noticed is all new and evolving. But right being able to how do I go out and buy TUSC or get enough TUSC. So then I can go online to use my TUSC currency to purchase my firearm.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So that’s kind of the infrastructure we’re building out right now. So we’re a new project, really. And so one way is you can buy it on set one of seven exchanges that we have were listed on right now or traded. So this is interesting about cryptocurrency is that they’re traded like stocks. And so the value is always shifting. So that’s a little harder for people to wrap their heads around. But right now you can buy TUSC very easily through seven one of seven exchanges and you just log into an account and set it up for free and then you can buy it with a credit card or if you want to buy a large amount, you can do a wire transfer through your bank to whatever exchange you choose. We are in talks right now and we should be on an ATM, crypto ATM network very soon. So I would hope like I can’t give a timeline but we’re in talks with the biggest one right now. And they’re talking about integrating us and so once that happens, we’ll be available on the big ATM network. So you can just go to an ATM and By TUSC, right through an ATM, and it goes right to your mobile wallet. And then we’re currently in discussions with several places where we’ll have the ability for people, for instance, that you can buy right from the website. So, and we’re gonna be working with the retailers on this. But if the retailer wants to accept except TUSC, they can set up an account with a variety of companies that we’re talking to, that they’ll have a little widget on their website that they can instantly buy house great then in there. And so we’re making it as easy as possible for people to get TUSC. But with any cryptocurrency, the we call it, the on ramps are the off ramps to get into crypto and get out of crypto. Those are the those are the things with pieces that we’re kind of building right now. And, and we’re not going anywhere. So we have a roadmap and where we are, we’re still I still think of us like a startup though or not. But there’s a lot of that infrastructure we’re building out right now. But we’re going to have all those pieces, you know, pretty quickly, you know, set up for retailers. So when we go and sign up for retail, we’re like, Look, here’s how you deal with the wallets and the plugins. And this is how your customers can get TUSC and things like that. So we’re gonna help hold the hand of retailers, which you won’t get with any other cryptocurrency, like if they want to accept Bitcoin, there’s no one from Team Bitcoin that’s going to come to your shop and help you set up or, you know, walk you through the process. Whereas with TUSC, we will because we are part of the gun community and we fully support it, and we want to help we created the solution because this has been a big problem.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Yeah, you know, we saw you had a SHOT Show, we got talking to you and thought this whole platform was state of the art ever, you know, quickly evolving. What did they got? Did what did the gun dealers, a logic guys that you spoke with on a lot of meetings? What What was their take on moving in this direction.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So I think that’s like how I think it really fell down how you would think of it the younger ffl the guys that grew up with social media, the guys that are you know, you know, a lot of the vets than that community, they get it, it’s not even a lot of them already have cryptocurrency, so those guys already get it, the guys that are already doing, you know, spending their time doing a lot of e commerce and really leverage a lot of Instagram, those guys get it. The I think it’s like the people that are a little more resistant or more the the Fudd guys that they always sell 40 fives in their gun store. You know, those guys, you’re never gonna win over to this. And so but i think i think it is a demographic issue. And we don’t expect every gun retailer to accept us right away. We think this is gonna be a long term process, but we’re going to be a long term project. So we don’t we’re building something that’s going to last and be here in 50 years. And so we also..

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
It also depends on the financial community, right? How many, you know, Citibank, when Citibank doesn’t take care, your credit card doesn’t lie credit cards to be processed anymore, because your gun dealer or Bank of America, I mean, it starts to raise some eyebrows, right. And, again, like I said, we’ve had people panicking, because of their 48 hour a 72 hour notice, you know, what do I do? And, you know, it’s nice to have an answer on the horizon here.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah. And so and we’ve run into that to you and I and I can tell you even as shacho, I talked to a lot of merchants that really had that same problem, that they literally were using something and they got a short notice, then boom, they’re out of business for two months, I was on a website, the other day, I was looking for a component because I build guns as a hobby. And I was looking for something and the website, and I’m just like, I tried to get ahold of the guy. But the website said, we’re down because we lost our merchant processing right there. And it was just like, we got the solution for that. And so and what we’re doing right now is we’re we’re kind of going to be launching this beta pilot program. So we got some, we got a bunch of things that are going to be put into, we’re gonna be launching a bunch of products to support retailers here in the next couple months. But any, if you have any ffls that are interested, we’re going to be launching this beta pilot, so we’re gonna want to bring in a bunch of retailers that want to be guinea pigs, so to speak. But for that, the they’ll be they’ll get some share of TUSC coin for their own risks. So there’s gonna be some compensation involved for them taking the risk and some pre free promotion, free marketing that comes with that. Because it’s going to be a learning curve, we need to get some feedback from the industry. And so we’re going to make it worth their time if they want to come on board and be an early adopter of TUSC. But I think this is the future. And you know, we don’t know what’s going to happen politically in this country either. Right? It certainly seems that one side of the ticket has already told you what they want to do, right? And you know, and you would know this too, just like in a lot of retailers, the words operation choke point come to mind back under the Obama administration back in 2012 2013, when they really put the hammer down on the financial industry to basically mess with the gunnery world. And so you got the same type of people going maybe in maybe in In a couple months, and you know, you never know when they’re gonna try to pull the rug, they’ve already said they’re anti gun, they already said they’re gonna try to come down in the industry. If they can accept task, it basically decentralizes and pulls away some of their tools to screw with people, at least on the financial piece of this. And there’s no. And again, remember, though, like if all of a sudden, the somehow the Gov the Treasury Department or the Comptroller of the Currency or whatever government agency they leverage, tell banks that you can’t let them buy guns with credit cards anymore. What are they going to do? Because if they can’t do that, that affects Venmo, and all those other places, too. So they don’t have another option there? Because those are all based in dollars. Yeah, I think currency solves that.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
It’s been kind of a quiet issue for the last six months to a year overall. But I want to say, you know, we’re not sure what’s going to happen with the election. And, you know, this would be one to definitely watch. It might be something just sleeping on the side. That can be, you know, resurfaced here flooded very quickly. So good luck. How so? What’s the ETA Rob on your, your platform being available?

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Right now we are available, we already have a working protocol we already have. I mean, we already have a product out there, you can buy TUSC on exchanges, right now, we do have a cloud based wallet. So if you want to get your fingers wet, and just try it out, you know, people can reach out to us at TUSC dot network or just me, I’m just at Rob McNealy calm. And you could contact us either one of those two websites. But you know, so if anybody’s got questions, I’m really easy. Just plug Rob McNealy into Google, you will find me, and I will be happy to answer any questions for anybody out there. But I think also, you know, even if they’re not the banked, cryptocurrencies cheaper than normal credit card processing, because you still have that issue, right now in the gun world, even when they got have gun friendly payment processing, with credit cards, they’re paying really high fees, with those even gun friendly, because there’s only you know, there’s a few merchant processors that will do the whole gun thing, but they’re expensive.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
TUSC. Yeah, I hear that the risk is being assessed as a premium to those who are staying and, and sad to say, but you know, supply and demand is not there. So the ones who are still in the game are raising their prices, I think artificially, and I don’t think that’s a fair thing to do so.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So when we tell people half a percent charge, or half percent transaction fee, no charge back and you get instant settlement into your wallet, and you get free promotion, and you’re getting insurance against the banking, the economics make sense, just on that to compete with normal credit card processing, and so on. And so like I said, it’s a new thing. But I think it is the future, because, you know, it’s interesting, the CEO of cash app, which is also the CEO of Twitter, jack Dorsey, they this week, just bought, they just diversified 1% of their company holdings into bitcoin. $50 million worth this last week. So corporate America is coming into crypto now. Okay, and this isn’t going anywhere. The crypto world is about a, you know, almost $400 billion market cap right now. Okay, this is not small money anymore, their institutional money, the State of Wyoming just allowed it that they can make crypto banks in Wyoming now. It’s the first state in the country that allows banks to actually hold crypto now as a custodian, okay, the crypto world is coming. Okay. And there’s there’s thousands of cryptocurrencies out there all kind of competing with each other. But none of them are focused on the gun industry, like we are with TUSC. So here’s the thing, it’s gonna happen. And it solves a problem now. So it just makes sense, to at least look at it. dip your toe in the water. You know, if you’re interested in coming on board, let me know, we’ll make it happen for you.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Yeah, it’s nice, nice to see you’re isolating and dedicating all of your research and platform development, everything to the gun industry, because I think it’s going to be an industry is lagging the lag behind just like, you know, other industries, you have the cannabis industry, you know, that’s highly regulated, the regulated depending on where you go with the gun industry is not going to be acceptable to everyone in this crypto business. So I applaud you for creating this, this community. So

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, well, then, john, I really do appreciate it. And I appreciate you coming on the show today. Where can people find out more about you? Where can they find out about ffl? consultants?

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Yeah, that one’s really easy. It’s ffl consultants calm, you know what, and that’s how most people find us or Google or when they’re looking for an ffl consultant. You know, we hopefully pop up first, and our phone number is available at our website and all the contact information. And let me just remind our listeners that your first call is always free. So just go online and schedule a call with us and we’ll make sure we get you get we get your questions answered fast.

Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
John Bocker, thanks so much for coming on the show. And folks, I will have Have all of John’s information contact information and website at Rob mcnealy.com and tune in make sure you hit that subscribe button on all the major pod catchers and our library and YouTube channels. And thank you so much for listening.

John Bocker – FFLConsultants.com
Thanks, Rob.

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