I just emailed my CCW instructor and asked him.
“Shall Issue,” should mandate that if they don’t find any reason not to issue my CCW, they MUST issue my CCW. Government shutdown or not.
It should be the same as far as background checks for purchases.
The law IS clear, but you know how the gun banners are.
I agree with shall issue of CCW. It gets trickier for people who have to do NICS, due to either not have CCW or living in a state that requires it. If the initial response from NICS is to delay the transaction, and you don’t hear back in 5 days with a reason to deny it, the transaction goes through. If a shop were to try to call NICS during a hypotehtical shutdown, and is unable to contact NICS, they would probably want to delay the sale themselves until they can get through. Now that would be for a new NICS request, not a pending one that was given an initial response of ‘delay’, that would likely proceed after the 5 business days, and a ‘bad guy’ would have been flagged up front. If a shop were to forgo the NICS call up front, and transfers an item to an individual who would have otherwise been flagged as a felon or ineligible, that store is liable to lose their operating licese, and thus their business.
I have sympathy with that difficulty, I have an FFL myself and own a small shop, and one of the last things you want to do is endanger your license for a questionable transaction. Luckily, many of the people around here have CCW, and don’t need NICS.