A transfer to another licensee is governed by a duty this part states directly, and the duty carries the weight. A licensee selling or otherwise disposing of firearms to another licensee, and a licensed collector disposing of curios or relics, shall verify the IDENTITY and LICENSED STATUS of the transferee before making the transaction. That verification is what this regime relies on for these transfers: the assurance is not something checked against a database but the established fact that the person on the other side really is who and what they claim to be.

Verification is established by the transferee furnishing a certified copy of their license, and by such other means as the transferor deems necessary. That second limb is unusual in this part: it leaves the sufficiency of the verification to the transferor’s judgment rather than fixing a procedure, which means a certified copy is the floor and not automatically the whole answer. The certified copy itself is straightforward to produce — the license contains a purchasing certification statement, and the original may be reproduced and the reproduction then certified by the licensee. A licensee who would rather have additional copies from ATF may request them in writing from the Chief of the Federal Firearms Licensing Center, setting out name, trade name if any, address, and the number wanted, at a charge of $1 for each copy paid with the request.

Three situations relieve the transferee of furnishing a certified copy again. A transferee who has already furnished one to a transferor need not furnish it again to that same transferor during the term of the transferee’s current license — note that the relief expires with the license, not with the relationship. No certified copy is needed where a firearm is being returned, directly or through another licensee, to the licensee it came from. And licensees within a multilicensed business organization need not furnish certified copies to other licensed locations of the same organization.

Separately from those three reliefs, a multilicensed business organization has an alternative to furnishing a certified copy of each license at all. It may furnish a transferor a list, certified to be true, correct and complete, containing the name, address, license number and date of license expiration for each. That is a substitution for the document rather than a fourth exception to the duty — the verification still happens, by other means.