What was the last thing you bought?

[Bulbasaur]

Oh, you're in for a fun process. No, you're not. >.<

You first need to go to your local police station to get the forms for the State of NJ Firearms Purchaser Identification Card (don't get the ones online like I did, I found out the hard way they were outdated and I had to do them all over again with the most recent versions that only the police station had). If you have any criminal background, history of domestic violence, alcoholism, or history of mental disorders, you might not be able to get it. Once you fill out the forms, you also need to indicate two people that are not family or relatives that can vouch for you. And yep, those two people will get forms also, so you might want to give them a heads up about it (and I didn't know this and never told them about it, so it made for a fun conversational piece the next time I met them! >.<). After all that gets done and approved, you need to get fingerprinted (at a place different from the police station. I had to drive 45 minutes out of the way to the place where I had it done.). After that, you go back to the police station and the rest of the stuff gets taken care of and if it's all good, you'll get the card. But yes, it was quite a few hours of paperwork, processing, and driving from place to place.

Also, if you're buying a handgun, you need to fill out a whole other series of forms for each handgun you want to buy. So if you want three separate handguns, you need to do the same pistol permit paperwork three times over and the police station needs to sign off on each of them. Also, those forms expire in about three months, so you shouldn't get those forms filled out unless you already know what handgun you want to get. Mine expired because I wanted to do some research first before buying and I ran out of time. But, if you're buying a rifle or a shotgun, you don't need additional applications (weird, I know).

And when you go to the gun store, you're also going to need to fill out a bunch of forms when making a purchase (regardless of what gun you're buying). Plan on spending an hour there, that's how long it took for me when I brought the Mossberg 590A1 I have. But yeah, take the training courses before buying the firearm. Besides avoiding the extra paperwork, I found I prefer using shotguns and rifles than pistols (and I'm a much better shooter with those). I'm glad I did that, because I kind of have bigger hands, so it feels a little cumbersome to have them all over a pistol while in the case of a shotgun or rifle, I feel I have more control over it.

Well jeez. That's a lot of stuff. XD