INDIANAPOLIS — At Indy Arms Company, Retail Manager Mark Welter conducts dozens of background checks a month for purchasers of new guns.

”Name, address, height, weight, gender, race and then there’s a whole series of questions the purchaser answers regarding legal issues, background, convictions, all that sort of stuff that would look for anything that would be a disqualifier,” said Welter. ”If it comes back proceed then we are able to continue with the sale. Delay means the system or the federal government needs some more time to finish running that process that can cause a delay of up to seven additional days and then a denial would be there is something prohibiting that person from having that firearm and the transaction stops there.”

Welter said its rare but occasionally the background check comes back denied.

”Sometimes when we inform a customer that he’s been denied, the reactions vary, from shock, ‘Oh, my gosh, I’ve never had anything on my record. I don’t know why this would happen,’ to, ‘Oh,’ which is, ‘You probably knew, you were just trying to take a chance to see what would happen.’”

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced new administrative rules defining who qualifies as a firearms dealer and will therefore be required to conduct background checks on gun sales.

”The regulation expands the definition of who must obtain a license and conduct a background check before selling firearms,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. “It will also close the gun show loophole. Under this regulation it will not matter if guns are sold on the internet, at a gun show or in a brick-and-mortar store. If you sell guns predominantly to earn a profit, you must be licensed and you must conduct background checks.”

Professor Jody Madeira of the IU Maurer School of Law studies gun laws in America.

”The new definition of who is engaged in the selling of firearms requires all people who devote time and attention and labor to dealing in firearms as a regular course of trade or business. And this is basically referring to individuals who predominantly earn a profit through repeatedly buying and selling firearms,” she said. ”If they sell through social media or mail order, flea markets, gun shows, on line, they have to register for a gun license and they have to conduct the same background checks that a federally licensed firearms dealer before the regulations had to conduct.”

Madeira said that while the DOJ estimates this will require 23,000 gun dealers to receive a license, 22% of all gun owners report they did not need a background check to make a firearms purchase.

Welter said that prohibitive persons who shouldn’t have a gun will still find avenues to make a purchase regardless of the background check requirements.

“If I’m a private person selling my own property, Indiana says I don’t have to do that as long as I don’t have any reason to believe that the purchaser is a prohibited person. So if I want to do a bill of sale between the two of us, that’s totally fine, and it doesn’t matter if that’s at a gun show and I’ve got a table with some of my personal guns on it that I’m selling or if I meet the guy in a public place and just do a handoff.

”If we want to go out in a parking lot and here I will just give you a gun and you can give me money, how is anybody gonna know? We don’t have firearm registration and so it is impossible to track person-to-person sales that go on if they go on on a personal basis. If you come over to my house and I sell you something, how is the federal government gonna know that?”

The rule is set to go into effect in 30 days.