The New York State Police held a call earlier today to discuss the changes that will impact retailers across the state as New York transitions to a point of contact state. Unfortunately, the process has been done without input from the firearm industry and will most likely cause severe impacts to your daily business.

As discussed, the state police will be the clearing house through a web-based application for all background checks for firearms and ammunition. Answers to many of the questions posed by the participants were not thoroughly addressed. State police did lay out a timeline for the roll-out along with explaining an upcoming addition to their FAQ section on the website concerning this major change. The call was accompanied by 2 slides with bullet point generally explaining the process with very little detail.

While lacking concrete information concerning how the new system will function, recourse for when it fails, appeals processes and the inevitable delays retailers will experience, they did lay out a few bullet points referencing actions retailers must take.

1. All NYS Firearms and Ammunition Dealers will be able to begin the registration process on August 16th.

2. Business Owners/Administrators will need to register the business-One Administrator for all stores.

3. Business Administrators invite their employees to register for their business.

4. Each user (administrators and store employees) will need an NY.gov business account.

5. All employee transactions are seen in one dashboard for the business.

The state police also mentioned that the background check fee for firearms will be $9 and ammunition $2.50. The state police said they will be the intermediary for all firearms transactions as they will contact NICS which does not explain then why they need to charge a fee. There seems to be little misunderstanding of what exactly a point of contact state (POC) actually means. Amazingly the state police said that there could be situations where someone could pass a background check for a firearm but fail for the ammunition. Their explanation was that for ammunition they might check more records in state, but obviously if one is prohibited from possessing or buying ammunition you would think they would also be prohibited from purchasing a firearm but not in New York’s bureaucratic world.

· The targeted date to begin processing NICS applications is Wednesday, September 13th.

· FBI will disconnect all connections with FFLs once NY becomes a POC.

· All registered users will be able to login in to the NYS NICS web application and submit new NICS transactions.

· Transactional cost- Firearms=$9 and Ammunition=$2.50

· An IVR-Automated Phone application system will be available for use by all dealers with a saved payment method.

· Live operators will only be available to help with technical assistance, they will not have the ability to enter NICS applications on behalf of the business.

NSSF^® will continue to monitor the situation and the impending roll-out.