I had been to Kesselring's a handful of times after Researcher had mentioned them to me over the years as a place to visit during my business trips to the Seattle area.

The only gun I bought from them was a late Win M42 field gun in near mint condition. Still had the hang tag. That was a couple years ago now. I noted that they were clearing out the business at the time. I had heard about some ATF issues in vague terms, but no details.

This morning, I stumbled across this Seattle Times article. If you can get past the glaring super liberal perspectives of the author, you still can see the store was a poorly run business for documenting sales. I really had no idea this little store was turning that kind of money. Interesting read.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/skagit-county-gun-shop-may-have-been-worst-in-us/

I visited Kesselring's a few times in the 90's and was somewhat surprised at the number of guns in the store. Coming from California, I was even more surprised that most were just sitting out on racks, in barrels, on shelves, leaning against the wall, etc. Not surprised that they had a hard time keeping track of the inventory. Nice shop to visit on business trips to Skagit County.

Everyone here should take a few minutes to read the article you linked to your post. It's very revealing on several levels. Here, we have a retailer that allegedly committed multiple violations of Federal Firearms law, yet was allowed to continue to be engaged in the business. That suggests to me that the Feds were either lax in their enforcement and prosecution efforts, or that the whole thing was grossly exaggerated. And why would we need more gun laws if the ones we have are not being enforced?

Another thing that jumps out at me is the number of firearms and the types of firearms involved that were said to be unaccounted for. The numbers included every type of firearm they sold. Contrast that with an almost identical number of large capacity semi-auto assault style guns that were allowed to be illegally transported into Mexico under Operation Fast and Furious under the Obama/Holder Justice Dept. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

Then there's the fact that such a high volume store close to Seattle never had an ATF Inspection until 2005. Contrast that with th number of very small dealers who were routinely inspected, audited, and harassed until they simply quit the business under the Clinton Administration. That kind of discredits the author's allegation that this problem was caused by the Gun Lobby tying the hands of the ATF.

I'd guess that a lot of the problems were caused by simply by a lax sales and accounting system where paperwork just got lost or destroyed, and there was a failure to follow up and record sales in the bound ledger books as required by law. A similar thing happened to the shop run by the old WWII Nazi Veteran German Gunsmith who was located a short bike ride from my Dad's house as I was growing up. If he knew you and had no reason to think you were a bad guy, then he simply sold you the gun and there was no 3 day waiting period. If he didn't know you, then you had to wait. And if there was some reason he didn't trust you, he just plain would not sell you a gun. Because of that, I doubt if many guns sold by him ended up being used in any crimes. His wife took care of the books, but she wasn't always there, so some transactions didn't get recorded properly and he ended up being forced out of the business. It was a cool place to visit.

After 35 years of visiting and working with retailers, this is a very familiar story. The only difference is it happens to be a gun store. But I have been in countless independent sporting good and shoe retailers who operated in just as slipshod a manner. And, eventually it catches up with them.

I use to audit for sales and use tax for Pennsylvania, yes the same great Commonwealth that put Mr. Trump over the top and is currently refusing to cooperate with Miss Jill Stein and the 'Old Hag's' request for a recount, and would openly tell business owners that if you owned a small or medium sized company and were audited for sales and use tax you were either turned in by an ex employee or were awful unlucky.

No 'lobby' tied our hands. We were always short of manpower, that's all. And its going to get worse as the current debt of 20 trillion Federal agencies are going to get slashed and burned for quite awhile.

No matter what the ATF was or wasn't doing to this little shop 75 miles north of Seattle, there must have been quite a bit of hinky stuff going on behind the scenes to get to the point the kid off'd himself over it.

But yes, the gov't seldom works on things that yield the most value first. They undoubtedly were conducting thorough investigations of every compliant to a T ma & pa dealer within a 20 min drive of the office.

I thought it was interesting that the number ten was repeated as being a flag to trigger an investigation, for recently sold guns involved in crime. Then, way at the end, the investigators 'found' 17 firearms that they missed. Seems to me like the shop got what they deserved, but shouldn't that trigger a flag against the 'investigators'.

What does ten mean in the grand scheme of things? Ten gun out of ten is a major red flag, ten out of five thousand not so much. It all has to be looked at in context. Those with an agenda will take thing out of context and blow them up because it serves their cause. Worse what crimes were the guns involved in? A minor secondary charge like possession while drunk driving, transporting in a car not in a case with the ammo locked in the trunk, or were they used in a real crime? These type of stories are often so slanted that you need to read them twice and think about what information is missing to figure out the real picture.

I have seen many small business run so poorly that embezzlement is often undetected for years, if ever. Worse if the owner is skimming cash out of the business then his employees often figure they also are entitled to a little for themselves. And if caught will say you can not do anything about it because I'll flip and tell the IRS what I know you have been doing for years.

Years ago I had a good friend who ran his gun store so sloppy that a good audit would have finished him off in no time. He was lucky in that he had a minor theft by one of his employees and decided to put into place fairly decent inventory control methods and made sure his records were complete. He passed three complete sales tax audits, a couple or IRS audits and several BATF inspections without a single problem. Not bad for a boy who quit school at 16. Now he is retired living out west and his store has passed through three different owners who all have failed to make a go of it. Two out of three of them I know have college degrees so education is not everything in the gun business.

An old boss always said regarding a cash business that if "you can steal from Uncle Sam, someone can steal from you.". Gil

Keep one thing in mind here. One of the boners Biden recently made regarding enforcement of the existing firearms laws is that they don't have enough resources to do so. He made this statement while at the same time pushing for even more laws such as "universal" background checks. A good example of the hypocrisy we've all had to endure for the past 8 years.
As an aside: I just wrapped up the 3 day Crossroads/SAR show here and the crowds are still enormous!
Jim

FWIW, the period of time Kesselrings was my "haunt" was the summer of 1968 when I was working out of the DNR office at Sedro Woolley.