A Cautionary Tale from Deleware on Permits to Purchase

Virginia gun owners could be facing the prospect of being required to possess a permit before they can purchase a firearm in Virginia.  Legislators have yet to introduce the bill but they recently paticipated in a webinar hosted by Johns Hopkins University Center for Gun Violence Solutions.  In this webinar Senator Scott Surovell, Chairman of Senate Courts and Delegate Patrick Hope talk about the path forward for such a scheme in Virgnia.  Last year, Delegate Hope introduced HB1424 which would have established a firearm purchaser licensing law. The bill would have required an individual to provide proof of training, be fingerprinted, pass a background check, and for approval of the license before they can purchase a firearm. The bill was referred to the Virginia Crime Commission for study. The Crime Commission presented the findings of their study which basically paved the way for the gun ban majority to move forward in this year's session of the assembly.

The State of Deleware recently passed a "Permit to Purchase" law to purchase a handgun (we don't yet know if Virgnia's would just be for handguns of for all firearms) that took affect in November. Bearingarms.com reported yesterday that their system does not appear to be ready for primetime.

The state police say the agency is taking an average of three days to process permit-to-purchase applications, well below the 30 days its given under the permit-to-purchase law. That's good, but the system still isn't operating like it's supposed to, despite the fact that Delaware had 18 months to get the new system up and running before the law took effect. 

The Crime Commission told legislators that if Virginia enacted such a law, it would require a delayed effective date to give the state police time to set up the system.  That is likely to create a surge in buying ahead of the effective date of the new law.

But after the law took affect in Deleware, some FFLs have seen a marked decline in sales:

If the state police have been able to deal with FFLs having to call in and verify that purchasers can legally get a gun without too many delays, it's only because the volume of sales had declined dramatically since the law took effect. Delaware Spotlight spoke to one gun store owner who said handgun sales have dropped by 60% to 65% since November, during what is typically some of the busiest months of the year for gun stores. 

That aligns with the 66% in Delaware from November to December 2025 recorded by the anti-gun website The Trace, and stands in stark contast to what happened nationally in those months. The National Shooting Sports Foundation reports there were 1,408,230 background checks performed on firearm transfers in November 2025, and that number ticked up to 1,587,049 in December. 

Even if Delaware's permit-to-purchase scheme was operating flawlessly, sales would still be down significantly. In order to buy a handgun in Delaware these days, a purchaser must first go through an eight-hour firearms training course which includes firing 100 rounds at a range. Between the cost of the training and the $85 fingerprinting fee, buying a handgun in the state now costs about $200 to $300 dollars more than it did this time last year.  

That is the real purpose of schemes like the permit to purchase - increasing the cost and burden of buying a firearm so that less are sold.  Hopefully, the legislature will at least exempt people with a concealed handgun permit from having to aquire permit to purchase, but that has not been the case with other laws passed by Virginia's gun ban majority.