Ah - clarification:
If we received a used gun from another FFL, the "pawn check" was not required - it was presumed that the FFL would have done any required checks on their end. For that matter, neither did we perform the "pawn check" when receiving a gun for transfer to another FFL. The "pawn check" was only required if we took in a gun from a private individual for sale or consignment.
Upon consideration, I suppose the rationale for the "pawn check" was as much to shield a dealer from the possibility of being charged with selling stolen goods as it was to locate/recover stolen property; a case
could be made that a dealer who was only acting as an intermediary in an out-of-state person-to-person transfer was not
selling a stolen gun
per se, but was only acting as an intermediary in order to satisfy Federal legal requirements - which, in itself, displays a law-
abiding intent rather than a law-
breaking intent. Of course, I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV...
In all honesty, the "pawn check" requirements predated the current Internet-based gun sales situation, and to my knowledge have not been updated; I can envision a stolen gun being listed on a auction site or For Sale board, and transferred out of state without the serial # ever being checked at any point in the process. Obviously I cannot speak to the local or state requirements for dealers in other jurisdictions.
I don't see how a dealer could be 100% confident that a transferred gun was or was not stolen without either waiting for the NCIC/pawn checks both before sending and after receiving the gun, or a comprehensive national registry of all firearms and their current owners - which I
definitely don't like the idea of...