Smith & Wesson's $160 million purchase of Savage Arms puts two major long-gun lines under one roof. A practical growth playbook for independent FFL dealers: audit your supplier concentration, lock terms while two reps still compete, and make sure local buyers can actually find you.
Q3 2026 retail data shows firearm units down 7.8% while revenue held nearly flat - a mix shift toward lever-actions, premium handguns and suppressors that changes what dealers should stock and how customers find them.
Customers searching for an FFL dealer near them compare stars, recency and replies before they ever compare transfer fees. A practical review playbook for gun shops, including the FTC rule that governs how you may ask.
Bank access and the licensing threshold are the two Q4 costs a dealer cannot control, and the two that decide which shops are still standing to take the transfer.
Every transfer, sale and shipment between licensees rests on one question: is that FFL real and current? Here is how the ATF lookup actually works, what it returns, what it cannot tell you, and how customers use it to judge your shop.
A new Illinois ordinance lets up to five home-based, appointment-only gunsmithing and transfer operations open their doors. For FFLs with no storefront, the entire business is being findable — here is the growth playbook.
The FBI confirmed NICS monitoring, ATF wrote a new alert policy, and the DOJ let the suppressor ruling stand. What changed, and what it means at the counter.
The NFA appeal window just closed. Here is how FFL dealers can capture the surge in suppressor, SBR and NFA transfer searches with the right pages, keywords, Google Business Profile and schema.
Most gun shops don't have a marketing problem — they have a plumbing problem. Nine technical fixes, in the order that gets an FFL's pages crawled, indexed, and found by nearby buyers.
August splits the market in two: adjusted firearms checks up 2.2 percent, NFA checks up 201.6 percent. Here is what the data says about FFL inventory, transfer revenue and the next 90 days.