Several lifelong Missouri residents with whom I spoke explained what it was like to buy and sell firearms under the PTP process. As they put it, the regulations were far from intrusive for gun buyers and represented rote components of everyday transactions surrounding guns. “It was no big deal at all,” a retired lawyer from Joplin who grew up working in his parents’ pawn and gun shop told me. “We never thought anything of it, just took a few minutes. Kind of made sense to have someone track the guns in town.”
