Lowball buyers are annoying, but there’s another side to this:
We have plenty of sellers with ridiculous asking prices too, sometimes apparently expecting to recover every dollar they put into a gun. Guns aren't magically exempt from depreciation. Nobody buys a new car, drives it for a year, adds $5,000 in wheels and accessories, and expects the next owner to reimburse them for the car plus every dollar they spent modifying it. Yet we see that mentality with guns all the time. Accessories and modifications are usually even worse—a $500 optic, $300 trigger and $200 worth of other parts don't automatically add $1,000 to the used value, and often they're worth considerably less installed than they would be sold separately.
Off-roster guns in particular seem to bring out the worst of it. Yes, scarcity can justify a premium in California, but “off roster” doesn't automatically mean whatever number the seller decides to put on it.
Offering $600 on a fairly priced $1,000 gun is ridiculous, but asking $4,500 for something realistically worth $2,500 and hoping somebody who doesn't know better will bite is the other side of the same coin. Buyers are free to make offers, sellers are free to say no, and ultimately the market decides.
So yeah, offering $600 on a fairly priced $1,000 gun is ridiculous. But asking $4,500 for something realistically worth $2,500 and hoping somebody who doesn't know better will bite is the other side of the same coin.
Buyers are free to make offers, sellers are free to say no, and ultimately the market decides. A ridiculous offer takes about three seconds to decline or ignore.
(And if the alternative is consignment, where you're often giving up 20–30% of the selling price anyway, not to mention the mandatory waiting period before the gun can even be sold, why not list it here at a realistic price and give a fellow member a decent deal while still putting more money in your own pocket?)