UPS has once again “gone woke” against gun companies, this time threatening to financially cripple small gun shops that rely on online sales to keep their doors open.
It was only two months ago that allegations of package destruction by UPS flooded news sources and stirred the emotions of lawful gun owners. Reports alleged the shipping giant took matters into their own hands to push forward on gun control by destroying packages sent to customers from gun companies, and it appears to be that they are back at it, but this time, their new policy seemingly aims to financially cripple the majority of the gun industry.
UPS has announced a new shipping policy when it comes to mailing firearms through UPS. Previously, the two biggest rules for shipping pistols were 1. You can’t use the US Post Office, and 2. Pistols need to be shipped 2-Day Air or faster. According to the new policy, any gun shop that doesn’t ship an average of at least 50 pistols a day will be forced to use UPS’ Next-Day Air shipping, which often doubles the cost of shipping, or more.
On the surface, this looks like nothing more than UPS trying to bend over backwards to avoid “getting canceled” wherein the small business owners and their customers will be footing the bill. Their requirement of needing to ship more than 50 pistols a day to have the privilege of using the cheaper shipping method can financially ruin the smaller gun shops that rely on sites like GunBroker and Armslist to stay in business. Not only would these smaller shops have to pay out the nose for more expensive shipping, but their sales will likely plummet due to the higher shipping costs.
Let’s go further down the economic hierarchy. Remember, the customer pays for everything. The customer keeps the lights on, not the business owner. The customer pays for the fuel in the delivery truck, not the grocery store. The customer pays for the yachts and private jets, not the CEO, and the CUSTOMER pays for the shipping, not the seller.
This new move for UPS’ volume requirement is in response to anti-gun politicians’ and lobbyists’ (they probably call themselves “do-groups” to sound better) efforts to enact what the gun industry and its supporters call “back-door gun control”. By drastically increasing the price of a product, fewer people will be able to buy, thus putting financial strain on small businesses, the backbone of this nation.
The potential turmoil for small gun shops is vast, however the current “elephant in the room” is appropriately the distributors and big online gun retailers. While small shops will have to pay the expensive “Next-Day Air” rates, somehow, it’s apparently okay for the big shops to use the cheaper “Second-Day Air” shipping method. This blatant double-standard appears to be little more than an attempt by UPS to pacify their bigger account holders.
Anti-gun groups and politicians have been pressuring big companies to cut ties with the firearms industry and gun owners. It feels like every day we have more and more companies banning lawful gun owners from their premises, and it looks like there’s no end in sight to the hysterical madness that defines the anti-gun crowd. With the recent addition of a new merchant commerce code potentially being applied to gun shops so the government can track gun and ammo purchases, it truly feels like back-door gun control is their main focus.
“The enemy diversion you have been ignoring will be the main attack.” -Murphy’s Law of Combat.
ShipOutdoors.com thankfully offers a solution for small gun shops to avoid the absurd new shipping requirements. Ship Outdoors is an innovative logistics company that handles FFL-to-FFL shipments of firearms at far cheaper rates than UPS and other big-name shipping companies. We spoke with John from ShipOutdoors.com and he explained how their system works. "ShipOutdoors has the solution to rescue all small gun shop owners, because they ship so much volume every day. They have no subscription and are actually cheaper than shipping UPS normally [due to our] volume discount. How it works is we use UPS but we have partners that ship so many guns a day we are exempt from that and we are cheaper than normal UPS rates because we get a volume discount. Therefore, we could save all those guys a ton of money.”
ShipOutdoors.com aims to consolidate shipping while offering smaller gun dealers cheap rates. Even before UPS’ alleged nonsense, their shipping rates were lower than dealing with UPS directly thanks to their volume discount, and their easy-to-use processing allows FFLs affordable, simple and reliable shipping options.
For more info on Ship Outdoors, follow the link here:
For more info on the new Merchant Commerce Code, follow the link here:
