Q: For handgun sales, Michigan law states that you may own one at 18. Of course, we are aware that federal states that you can only buy from an FFL dealer at 21. For years and years we have been under the understanding that a parent can disclose to us that they are buying a handgun for their own 18-20 year old child and that it would be legal for us to do provided they are not otherwise prohibited from owning a firearm. (They would just need to re-register the firearm after purchasing it to comply with state laws.) In fact, earlier this year our local ATF inspector told us that he had no issue with this while he was here for the initial walk through for our new FFL. Does FFL Guard agree with this idea? Part 2 of my question is this…This has become a convoluted mess…One of our employees misunderstood what we believed the law to be and turned down a sale like this the other day. A father tried to purchase a handgun for his 18-20 year old daughter and was refused by us. Later, we discovered a relative of the family (the girl’s grandfather or uncle) came in and purchased the same model gun. (We later discovered same address, same model gun, etc.. In fact, I’m told that the father was seen in the parking lot after the sale with the buyer. We did not know this was happening before the sale.) At this point, we believe that this is likely a straw purchase and are preparing to contact customer as you advised in your response earlier today. If the father was permitted to make this purchase in the first place, would it be permissible to reacquire the firearm from the buyer, then re-sell to the father? If not, we would re-acquire the firearm and not re-sell to them.
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