How to sell

Selling at a gun show

A gun show puts you in a room full of buyers, which sounds like exactly what you want. What it actually puts you in is a room full of dealers, all of whom do this for a living and none of whom are in a hurry.

When a show is a good idea

• You have one or two interesting guns and you enjoy this. Walking a show with a rifle over your shoulder is a genuinely decent way to find its natural buyer, and some people like the day out.
• You want to compare offers quickly. Twenty dealers under one roof is real price discovery, and it’s honest information even if you sell to none of them.
• The gun is niche but not rare. Shows are where the person who collects exactly that thing turns up, and they will pay more than someone who has to guess who wants it.

What it costs, and what no one mentions

• The people offering are dealers buying to resell, so the offers are wholesale — the same arithmetic as any dealer, but made in a corridor with someone waiting behind you.
• You’re negotiating cold, on your feet, against people who do this every weekend and know exactly what your gun is worth. That asymmetry is the whole reason shows work for them.
• A table costs money and a day, and if you take a table you’re committed to standing behind it whether or not anybody comes.
• You can’t bring an estate. Forty guns, ammunition and a safe don’t go to a show, and the pieces you can carry are rarely the ones carrying the value.
• Transporting firearms to and from, and doing every transaction properly on a busy floor, is genuine work.

Where we’re the better answer

Anything you can’t carry, and anything where you would rather not negotiate. We come to the guns instead of the guns coming to us, price the whole collection including everything around it, and pay once. For a single interesting rifle a show may well beat us, and if that’s what you have, go and enjoy it.

Should I take my father's collection to a show to see what it’s worth?

Take photographs to a show and leave the guns at home. You’ll get useful opinions and no risk, and you’ll learn quickly that the same gun gets very different reactions from different tables — which tells you it’s worth having someone go through the whole thing properly.

No route is best for every gun. The one that’s best for yours depends on what you actually have — which is worth establishing before you commit to any of them.

The other routes

Auction or dealer? · Pawn shop or gun dealer? · Selling privately · What a dealer actually pays · What is it worth by maker