Q: We had a customer attempt to purchase a gun who did not speak English fluently. He spoke Chinese/Mandarin and provided a witness, but the witness wasn’t reading the form for him word for word since the buyer spoke and understood very basic, broken English. Instead, the witness was coming up with his own interpretation of what the questions meant and was trying to relay that to the buyer to make him understand. Of course, we stopped the sale at that point. What is the correct procedure to sell a firearm to an individual who does not speak English but satisfies the other criteria to own a firearm? Is the form available in languages besides English, and if so, are we allowed to use any of those forms? And finally, in examples such as this one in which the buyer speaks a foreign language and doesn’t have a sufficient comprehension of the English language, may they provide a translator as their witness to read the questions to them in their own language? Thank you.
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