What’s a Gun Appraisal?
A gun appraisal is an informed assessment of a gun’s fair market value.
So, it’s where someone like a gun industry expert tells you how much a gun would be worth if you had to price it for sale today.
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Find Out How Much That Gun’s Worth!
Want to know the value of your gun and potentially sell it for big bucks? Talk to us! We’ll give you a free appraisal online as well as a sale price you won’t be able to resist.
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Ways to Get a Gun Appraisal
1. Ask Industry Professionals to Do Remote Appraisal
Effort: Low
Cost: Free or paid
Reliability: High
It’s possible to ask people in the firearms trade or gun industry to appraise a gun remotely. In particular, you can now find gun appraisal sites online.
We ourselves offer the service at Cash for Arms. Gun owners send us details using our gun appraisal form or contact page. After we have all the info, we provide our estimate of the gun’s value.
There are other options aside from us, of course. For example, the Blue Book of Gun Values also offers this online service aside from selling a gun appraisal book themselves.
However, you have to pay a fee with them, whereas we offer free gun appraisals. We even offer free antique gun appraisals online through our historical-weapon experts!
2. Ask Industry Professionals to Do In-Person Appraisal
Effort: Moderate (because you have to travel with the gun)
Cost: Free or paid
Reliability: High
You can also bring your gun directly to industry professionals so they can inspect it in person. From there, they can assign it a value.
Most people doing this bring their guns to a local gun store. Take note that some FFLs (federal firearm licensees, or legal gun dealers) will charge you a fee for this.
As we said earlier, we don’t charge for our online service, but some other FFLs do. That’s also why there may be slight differences in valuation across shops, though the numbers should stay close to each other.
3. Ask Others for Informal Appraisal
Effort: Low
Cost: Free
Reliability: Low
If you can’t or don’t want to contact a professional for some reason, you may turn to “informal experts.”
Bear in mind that this isn’t really an option if you’re getting a gun appraisal for insurance, though. Only the two previous options are viable then.
Anyway, if you’re taking this route, you can basically crowdsource your appraisal data. Go to gun communities on firearm-collector forums. Reddit has some of these. Most popular gun brands also have their own collector forums.
From there, you can post information and photos showing your gun. Ask more knowledgeable people to tell you what they think it would be worth in the current market.
You can also ask people who’ve recently sold similar guns how much they sold for. Take the information with a grain of salt, however, as you’ll be going on non-professional hearsay.
Finally, remember that you don’t have to do this online. It’s often possible to get opinions like these in local gun clubs and shooting clubs too.
4. Do an Informal Appraisal Yourself
Effort: Moderate (because you have to research yourself)
Cost: Free
Reliability: Low
Again, this isn’t viable if you’re getting an appraisal for insurance purposes. However, it’s another free option if you’re worried about gun appraisal cost and don’t want to try services like ours for some reason.
To do this, go on gun auction websites. GunBroker is a good example. You’ll have to register to get access to the filters for the next step on that particular site, by the way.
Once you’ve registered as a member on the site, search for guns like yours. Next, filter the results so that the website only shows you the completed sales.
Next, filter the results again so you see only the sales that are both recent and completed. Check the prices of the guns most similar to yours and average those to get the rough value of your gun.
What is the best way to get guns appraised?
Arguably the best way to get guns appraised is to have industry professionals do the job. They have the knowledge to value guns fairly based on various factors that most non-FFLs can't account for.
Here’s an example of a situation where many informal appraisers would miss a trick. Sometimes, we see people claim that an inherited gun they're selling is like-new and should fetch like-new prices, based on their and other friends’ appraisals.
But then we inspect that seemingly like-new gun and find that it's actually been refinished. The refinishing is what has given the gun its "new" shine.
In that case, it may look like new but it's not. So, it shouldn’t be valued the same as a new or like-new gun.
Some gun models even lose value dramatically from a refinishing job, because it's considered an irreversible aftermarket modification! Only a professional gun appraisal would note this sort of thing.
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Sell Us That Gun for Big Money
If you’re here because you want an easy way to sell your gun for what it’s worth, why not sell to us? We do both free appraisals and gun purchases from sellers like you. See what we can offer!
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Get a Free Gun Appraisal Online Today!
Think you’d like us to take a look at your gun for free after all? Just contact us or send us the details here on our website!
We’ll be happy to inspect the information (and we’ll let you know if we need more) to give your gun a value. In many cases, we even get back to people in just an hour of receiving the info!