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stringent or appallingly lax. An applicant doesn’t have to demonstrate any firearms knowledge, not even whether he knows the difference between a revolver and a pistol, a .44 or a .45. It is much harder to get a license to operate a powerboat on the Chesapeake Bay, to become a substitute teacher in New Jersey, or to get a California driver’s license—far, far harder to get a Maryland permit to carry a single handgun or a license to hunt in Maryland’s forests—than it is to get a license that enables you to acquire at wholesale prices thousands of varieties of weapons and have them shipped right to your home. Roughly half the federal firearms licensees don’t maintain a bona fide store, according to ATF, but operate instead out of their homes. Some of these “kitchen-table” dealers sell guns at gun shows, but many don’t deal guns at all; they hold a license simply to buy their guns at cheap wholesale prices. A small but obviously important segment use their licenses to buy guns wholesale for distribution to inner-city arms traffickers.

“We’re not in the business of putting people out of the firearms business,” said Anthony A. Fleming, chief of ATF’s firearms and explosives operations branch, in charge of dealer licensing and inspections. “If people qualify for a firearms license, by law we have to issue them a license.”

But federal law, at least on paper, also insists that anyone who receives a license must actually engage in the business of selling firearms. In practice, however, Fleming concedes there is little ATF can do to compel a licensee to become a legitimate commercial business. “We can’t force him to advertise,” Fleming said. “We can’t say you’ve applied for a license and by the end of two years you have to have at least ten sales. Your retort, immediately, would be, ‘I’m open for business, I’ve got my door open, anybody comes in here I’m ready to sell them a gun.’ There’s nothing we can do about that.”

He added that some licensees who operate from their homes do run sophisticated dealerships. “I’ve seen residential dealers with a better setup and better inventory than a commercial business. And then I’ve gone into commercial places and found only five or six guns in there. You wonder why they’re paying rent. But they’re allowed to have a license and be in the business.”

A look at ATF licensing records can turn up some surprising revelations about who among us are licensed gun dealers. Licensed dealers turn up everywhere, even on the quietest streets in the best neighborhoods. My ATF printout of Maryland dealers identified 334 in Baltimore alone, yet the 1992–93 yellow pages for Greater Baltimore listed only eighteen established dealers and pawnshops. Among the dealers not listed in the phone book were two entities with the intriguing names Make My Day Guns and Shalom Services Company.

A Los Angeles Times reporter, David Freed, acquired the roster of Los Angeles County licensees and found the list included a Chinese baker, a survivalist, a fertility specialist, a school policeman employed by the Los Angeles Unified School District (he listed school offices as his licensed place of business), a man who told Freed he had experienced “multiple personality changes,” and an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (he listed DEA headquarters in Los Angeles). The list also included a former soldier dishonorably discharged from the Army and arrested on burglary and concealed-weapons charges whose licensed premises was a hotel room.

My neighbors may not want to hear this, but on May 15, 1992, I set out to join this none-too-exclusive club and applied for my own Federal Firearms License. The two-page application, ATF form 7, asked which grade license I wanted. There are nine levels, costing from $30 to $3,000, the latter qualifying the holder to import “destructive devices” such as mortars, bazookas, and other weapons with a barrel-bore diameter of half an inch or more. The form asked the same nine questions about my criminal past that appear on form 4473. It also asked what other business would be pursued at