Let’s say you’ve got some extra guns when what you really need is some extra cash. And you might need that money for something every bit as important as guns, like chemotherapy to treat your cancer. You might be tempted to take them to a local gun shop to sell them on consignment. Do not ever do this. And not because ‘you should never ever ever sell a gun’ like some guys believe . . .
From katu.com
VANCOUVER, Wash. – A Vancouver man battling cancer made a tough decision to sell part of his gun collection to help pay bills.
Now, Andrew Hammond is without either. He took eight of his 10 guns to C&C Consignment in Vancouver in hopes of making $2,000 through consignment sale, which gives you the money after your items are sold in store.
On Friday, Hammond returned to the store to collect the money after hearing his guns had been sold. But C&C was locked.
Hammond said he needed that money to help pay bills after undergoing years of cancer treatment. He estimated he could pay for a month of medical expenses with the money.
“I went through some pretty tough chemo,” he said.
The guns that he gave to C&C were family heirlooms – gifts from his father, who had just passed away. His father and grandfather owned the gun collection, which had been passed down in the family for more than 100 years.
For Hammond, losing both his guns and money is an emotional as well as financial drain.
“They’ve managed to just really depress me,” he said. “Take some wind out of my sails.”
We stopped by C&C on Monday afternoon and found a crew hauling away boxes from the store. The person at the store declined comment.
The store gave us a flier that stated that although C&C is closing, they have “every intention of settling all accounts with customers.”
“We have been working on a loan, which has been approved and we are now awaiting final funding of the loan,” the flier read.
First of all, unless you’re selling rusty single-shot shotguns, selling eight guns for only $2000 is a terrible exercise in ‘buy high, sell low’ economics. Second, a seller has no legal recourse when a consignment shop or pawnbroker goes under. Mr. Hammond is, in legal terms, ‘shit out of luck.’
When you take a gun to a retailer to sell it on consignment it becomes part of their inventory. Businesses have creditors, and creditors like to have collateral before they lend money to small businesses with extravagantly high failure rates like specialty retail stores. Before 1st Multinational Savings Bank will lend Joe FFL a dime, they will require him to grant them a security interest in all of his inventory, whether existing at the time of the loan or acquired after the loan is funded.
Your guns become Joe FFL’s inventory, and then they become 1st Multinational’s collateral for Joe’s debt. When Joe becomes insolvent and declares bankruptcy, 1st Multinational claims their security interest in Joe’s inventory. They get clean title to your guns, Joe leaves town in the dead of night, and you’re left in possession of a worthless consignment receipt and an unsecured debt which you have no chance of collecting.
Don’t ever consign your guns. If you can wait for a good price, sell them online to the highest bidder (and run the transfer through an FFL to cover your ass). If you must sell quickly (because, say, you need money to pay for chemotherapy) you won’t get a good selling price. You might only make fifty cents on the dollar, but it’s better to lose 50% of your proceeds than 100% of your guns with nothing to show for it.
I was personally familiar with C&C Consignment and they had a terrible reputation among local shooters. They were unfriendly, overpriced and uninformed. I personally heard them giving completely reckless advice to first-time gun buyers. C&C Consignment were despicable clowns and I’m delighted they’re gone, but bankruptcy doesn’t just happen to ‘bad’ gun stores like them. It can happen to any gun store.
The same thing that happened to Andrew Hammond happened to a good friend of mine fifteen years ago. He placed several rifles on consignment, including a Remington-contract Mosin-Nagant made for the Tsar’s armies, before they stopped being the Tsar’s armies. He took them to a gun store that had been in business for decades, and he lost every single one.
Now you know.
Seems clear, North east united states, California, Colorado and Illinois are the poster child states for tyranny. They will all go to hell in a hand basket soon.then we can start over…
when selling online use http://www.pistolpay.com, the most secure way to buy/sell online and http://www.smallarmstrader.com which is powered by Pistolpay.
The existing Connecticut safe storage law specifically refers to a loaded firearm. Regardless of whether it’s smart or not, perhaps momma Lanza was perfectly legal in keeping her unloaded guns lying around, even if she knew her son was a ticking time bomb. Just saying.
§9-114 of the Uniform Commercial Code covers this (the section number and text may be different in different states). If a consignor (the owner) complies with §9-114 to the letter, the consignor’s interest will be superior to the interest of the bank or lender. However, compliance is virtually impossible.
The bottom line is that consigned guns are at risk and there’s not much that the owner can do about it, except not to consign the guns in the first place.
If you keep submitting well written articles just like this then I will always keep returning back to your blog. Really good material.
Thank you for these great advise. When you’re desperately in need of money you can make some foolish decisions. Hopefully this advise will save someone a bit of grief. It’s also good to hear this company went out of business. BTW: with all the record sales in the firearm industry over the past year how can you possibly run a company into the ground like this? On top of being unfriendly, overpriced, and uninformed they must have also been extremely incompetent.
This actually sounds amazingly similar to what went on with Mitt Romney at that one Coal Mine. There were news articles saying that Coal Miners felt they were being forced to attend, even tho they did not support Romney, and a statement from management saying they were not required to attend, but if they wished to attend they were just making sure they could be accommodated.
I wonder if Obama would recommend using the same choke for the goose as for the gander?
Soo…..if someone breaks into your home who is a minor…and gets your firearms..your screwed…great
It’s actually thou shalt not murder but who cares about facts.
a loud cheer from the South goes with you. best of luck!
Come on down RF, come on down. The Lone Star State is also trying to pass open carry and campus carry. We shall see…but it’s a great state for self defense believers at any rate
I seldom click on your cheesecake links (not what I come to TTAG for), but I did this time. Holy damn, what a body.
Apparently, they are, under the direction of the Chocolate Sock Puppet-in-Chief. This is going to be an interesting showdown, and I don’t think Sheriff’s Department are going to take this sitting down.
Some kind of smackdown is looming. I hope it’s the kind we want. There is NOTHING to keep Sheriffs from arresting SS (!) agents if they try it.
Sheriffs are obligated to enforce state laws not federal laws. Marshalls enforce federal laws as I understand it. They may ask Sheriffs for assistance or any other local LEO. All this shows is the tyrannical nature of the gun-grabbers.
Hmm, OK. Not bending over and giving up rights whenever something bad happens would be progress, wouldn’t it? Yeah, I’d like to see us do that.
we are all props…
Thomas Jefferson treated his slaves fairly well by any standard, but that didn’t change the fact that they were slaves. If you have an entity like government that claims control over your body or your life, you may not be a slave as in, ” get in those fields and pick the cotton kind of slave,” but you are no less a slave.
The gun issue aside, there goes any comfortable room to operate that the newly legal cannabis growers, distributors and users ever thought they had. Unintended consequences.
Rhetorically, I think any regulation of arms (or infringement of RKBA) of peaceful, mature adults could be called slavery.
In this case, the whole United State of America is a slave state.
More specifically, any state that tries to remove all weapons from all citizens except security/state employees is a slave state.
In this case, Britain does not have a slave state, but some states (like in Southeast Asia and non-state dictators) are slave states.
Then there’s complete slavery, which doesn’t really work on entire populations, just minorities, captives, et al.
I think calling CT a slave state but, for example, IA not a slave state is odd.
If I were an olive in that Man’s salad…
Texas will welcome Beretta with open arms and tax incentives 🙂
I inherited about 45 guns. I dont know the first thing about them. I am located just outside Minneapolis MN, who should I approach to attempt to sell these guns and get the best market value?
ALSO, guns on consignment tend to get abused/damaged by IDIOTS, and
you have NO control or recourse over that.
Greetings!!!Bliss of the Day, Do you want to donate your kidney for money or you are a recipient ? Email us: [email protected]
There can be a huge difference if you have rare or antique guns. If you give them to a place like http://www.rockislandauction.com. That is all they do and have a large customer base, and most likely have someone looking for the gun you want to sell. Sure you got to pay a percentage commission. But if they get you a few extra bids more than you could have got selling as an online classified it is worth it. Plus you do not have to mess with shipping, FFL’s, any legal issues that can come up from different states.
And everybody knows when you are selling anything you need good photos, detailed descriptions or you will not get the most money. The big auction houses do that and put out a paper catalog too.
Don’t get me wrong, you can do this but its a lot of work, especially if you have 10+ guns. Like I said rare guns and antique, anyone can sell a Glock 17. But you might miss out on real money if you have something old and in good condition. They just emailed out the process of how they sell guns: https://www.rockislandauction.com/blog/how-riac-sells-your-guns/
I sell guns on consignment occasionally because I don’t want to deal with the hassle of selling them online and if I sell through local listings, I will have to travel somewhere and go to some FFL and do a transfer there…for the time I will have to spend, I’ll make more money billing clients than I would lose on consignment.
Is it necessary to transfer ownership to the consignment broker? Why couldn’t the broker inspect the gun, record the details and leave it in your possession until it sells? The agreement would be easy enough to draw up. Do any sellers operate that way?