Yes. Old Steel Arsenal sells surplus and collectible firearms at a fixed price. There is no bidding, no proxy bid to set, and no auction clock. The price on the listing is the price you pay, and the gun ships insured to your FFL. You are trading the chance of a bargain for a number you can check against your budget today.
What it actually costs to get the gun home
Sticker price is not landed price on either path. Here is the same pistol, at the same item price, on both routes. The point is not which gun is cheaper. The point is what gets added after you decide to buy.
The example gun: a West German SIG P228 at $900. That figure is illustrative. It is not a quoted price and not an observed GunBroker sale. Use it as a template and drop your own numbers in.
Scenario A — your FFL is in Texas (example rate 8.25%)
| Line | GunBroker path | Old Steel Arsenal path |
|---|---|---|
| Item price | $900.00 | $900.00 |
| Shipping to your FFL | $40.00 | $0.00 |
| GunBroker Marketplace Service Fee (1% of item) | $9.00 | — |
| Seller credit-card surcharge | $28.20 | $0.00 |
| Sales tax collected at checkout | $77.55 | $74.25 |
| Your local FFL transfer fee | $35.00 | $35.00 |
| Total | $1,089.75 | $1,009.25 |
Scenario B — your FFL is in Tennessee (example rate 9.61%)
| Line | GunBroker path | Old Steel Arsenal path |
|---|---|---|
| Item price | $900.00 | $900.00 |
| Shipping to your FFL | $40.00 | $0.00 |
| GunBroker Marketplace Service Fee (1% of item) | $9.00 | — |
| Seller credit-card surcharge | $28.20 | $0.00 |
| Sales tax collected at checkout | $90.33 | $0.00 |
| Your local FFL transfer fee | $35.00 | $35.00 |
| Total at checkout | $1,102.53 | $935.00 |
| Tennessee use tax you may owe on the purchase | included above | $86.49 |
| Total once tax is accounted for | $1,102.53 | $1,021.49 |
Read the last row before you read anything else. The honest gap on this example is about $80 either way, and it does not come from tax. It comes from the marketplace fee, the card surcharge, and shipping. Sales tax is collected only where required by law.* Where it is not collected at checkout, the tax does not disappear. It moves from the checkout page to your own state return, which is why the Tennessee column carries a use-tax line instead of a blank.
* We collect sales tax where we are registered to collect it. Purchasers in other states may owe use tax to their state; consult your state’s revenue department.
Assumptions, so you can argue with them:
- Example tax rates only. Your actual rate depends on where your FFL is located, not where you live. Texas 8.25% is the statutory combined maximum and the rate in Plano. Tennessee 9.61% is the Tax Foundation’s 2026 average combined rate.
- On the GunBroker path, tax is calculated on the item plus shipping, per GunBroker’s marketplace facilitator policy. Check your own order total, not ours.
- The 1% Marketplace Service Fee is GunBroker’s published buyer fee and applies to every buyer, per GunBroker’s Marketplace Service Fee and Fees for Using GunBroker.com help pages. It was introduced in July 2021 as the Compliance Fee and has been renamed since. Verify the current rate before you rely on it.
- The credit-card surcharge is set by the individual seller, not by GunBroker. Three percent is typical. Some sellers charge nothing, some restrict it to the item price, and several states limit or prohibit surcharging entirely. Neither example state restricts it.
- $40 shipping is a typical insured handgun rate. Plenty of GunBroker sellers ship free.
- $35 is the 2026 national average FFL transfer fee. It is the same on both paths, so it cancels. It is in the table because your wallet does not care that it cancels.
- Our side shows $0.00 twice on purpose. We do not add a card surcharge and we do not add a buyer fee.
What an auction asks of you
An auction is a mechanism, not a marketing gimmick, and it is good at what it does. It is just worth knowing what it costs you in things other than money.
It asks for your time. Listings run for days. GunBroker’s AutoBid places proxy bids on your behalf up to a maximum only you can see, which spares you from refreshing the page, but you still have to decide what that maximum is before you have handled the gun.
It asks you to bid against strangers with different reasons. The other bidder may want a matching-numbers example for a collection you know nothing about. On a scarce piece that is exactly the mechanism working correctly.
It asks you to accept an uncertain end time. Under the 15 Minute Rule, a bid placed inside the final fifteen minutes extends the auction until fifteen minutes pass with no bids. GunBroker built it to stop sniping and give everyone a fair shot at their best bid. It also means an auction you planned around at 8pm can still be running at 9:40.
None of that is a flaw. It is what an auction is. Some weeks you want it. Some weeks you want to buy a pistol on your lunch break.
How we price and grade
We do the boring version. One price per listing, set by us, visible before you commit.
The price is the price. No bidding, no reserve, no buyer’s premium. When we run a sale, the old price stays struck through next to the new one so you can see what changed.
Grading is honest, and the word “lot” is used honestly too. Every rifle and pistol is bench-inspected and hand-graded — bore, headspace, matching numbers, finish described plainly. Single-serial collectibles are listed one at a time, photographed as the specific gun you will receive. Surplus that arrives in quantity is different, and we say so on the listing: the West German P228s are a luck-of-the-draw lot, sorted into Grade A and Grade B, with year, markings, grip style, and finish wear varying between individual pistols in the same grade.
If luck-of-the-draw is not good enough, buy your way out of it. Handpick is a paid option on lot items. Tell us what matters — finish, trigger, date code — and we send photos of the examples in stock that fit, and you choose. That is us admitting the limits of a graded lot rather than papering over them.
Shipping and paperwork are ordinary. Firearms ship insured to a licensed FFL, not to your door. C&R-eligible items can go straight to a Type 03 holder. Many listings, including the P228s, ship free. Details are on our FFL and shipping page.
Current West German SIG stock lives on the P226 and P228 page.
When GunBroker is the better tool
We would rather say this than have you find it out on your own.
Rare, specific, one-of-a-kind pieces. We stock roughly a hundred guns. GunBroker has thousands of sellers. If you need a particular serial range, a specific arsenal refurb stamp, or something we have never had in the building, the wide net wins. We are a shop, not a search engine.
When you want to hunt for a bargain. Fixed pricing cuts both ways. It removes the risk of overpaying in the last fifteen minutes, and it removes the chance of stealing something at 3am because nobody else was watching. If the hunt is the fun part, go hunt. That is a real thing to want and an auction is built for it.
When you already know the market cold. If you can value a gun from three photos faster than we can grade it, an auction lets you back your own judgment and get paid for it. Our fixed price is partly a service to buyers who do not want to make that call alone.
When a seller near you has it. Sometimes the answer is the listing 40 miles away with local pickup, and that is fine.
What we are good at is narrower. We handle one slice of the surplus and milsurp market, we grade it consistently, and we quote you a number you can commit to without setting an alarm.
Browse everything in stock on the shop page.
Browse the full catalog, check current West German SIG P226 and P228 stock, read the FAQ, or see FFL and shipping details.
General information for collectors, not legal, tax, or investment advice. Fees, tax rates, and third-party marketplace policies change; verify current figures before you buy.
Common Questions
Is Old Steel Arsenal cheaper than GunBroker?
Not automatically, and we are not going to claim it. Two guns at the same listed price will land at different totals, but the gun itself is the biggest variable and it is the one we cannot compare for you. What we can compare is the mechanics. On the illustrative $900 example above, the GunBroker path adds a 1% buyer fee, a typical 3% seller card surcharge, and shipping. Our path adds none of those, and many of our listings ship free. That works out to roughly an $80 difference once you account for tax on both sides. On a genuinely scarce piece, GunBroker’s reach can easily be worth more than $80 to you. Run the numbers on the specific gun you want, with your own FFL’s transfer fee and your own state’s rate, before you decide anything. Treat the table above as a worksheet, not a verdict, and verify GunBroker’s current fees yourself.Do I pay sales tax when I buy from you?
No sales tax is collected on orders shipped outside Texas. Today we collect it only on orders shipped to a Texas FFL. On orders shipped to an FFL in another state, we do not collect it at checkout, because we collect sales tax where we are registered to collect it. That is not the same as owing nothing. Most states with a sales tax also have a use tax, and the obligation to report it falls on you as the purchaser. Consult your state’s revenue department for how and when to file. What matters is the state your receiving FFL is in, not where you live, because tax follows the delivery address. On GunBroker, tax is collected at checkout in most states, because GunBroker acts as a marketplace facilitator and remits on the seller’s behalf. If you hold a valid resale or dealer exemption, tell us before you order rather than after, because refunding collected tax is more work than not collecting it.Can I see the actual gun before it ships?
It depends on whether the listing is a single gun or a lot, and the listing tells you which. Single-serial collectibles are photographed individually. The images are the pistol or rifle you will receive, and the description covers that specific example’s bore, markings, and finish. Surplus lots work differently. The West German P228s, for instance, are graded into A and B tiers, and pistols within a tier vary in year, markings, grip style, and wear. For those, add the paid Handpick option at checkout. We will email you to ask what you care about most, send photos of the in-stock examples that match, and hold the one you pick. Nothing ships to your FFL until you have agreed to the specific gun. The listing itself is the source of truth here. If it describes a specific serial and shows that gun’s own photographs, that is what arrives. If it describes a graded lot, expect variation within the grade.Do you take trades, consignments, or offers on price?
Our listed price is our price, and we do not run an offer system on individual guns, because a posted price only means something if it is the same number for everyone who loads the page. What we do run is sales, and when we do, the previous price stays visible struck through on the listing so you can see exactly what moved. We do buy and take firearms on consignment, and that is a separate conversation rather than a form on the website. Get in touch through the shop with what you have, including maker, model, condition, and any paperwork. For anything involving transfers in or out, including NFA items, pricing and process are laid out on our FFL and shipping page. Transfers into our shop are priced on that page as well, at $25 with a Texas License to Carry, $35 without one, and $100 per NFA item.Sources
- GunBroker Help Center — Marketplace Service Fee: “The Marketplace Service Fee is a fee assessed by GunBroker and added to the price of the item at the time of purchase for all buyers. The Marketplace Service Fee is currently 1% of the purchase price of the item.”
- GunBroker Help Center — Fees for Using GunBroker.com: “Bidders/buyers are charged a 1% Marketplace Service Fee upon purchase of an item.” Introduced July 2021 as the Compliance Fee.
- GunBroker Help Center — Marketplace Facilitator Sales Tax Collection
- GunBroker Help Center — Sales Tax for Buyers
- GunBroker Help Center — AutoBid
- GunBroker Help Center — 15 Minute Rule
- GunBroker community — Credit Card Fee Question on Auctions (the 3% charge is a per-seller setting, not a GunBroker fee)
- GunTab — Marketplace Facilitator Sales Tax Collection (state rollout list; tax applied to merchandise plus shipping)
- Tax Foundation — Texas Tax Rates & Rankings, 2026
- Tax Foundation — Tennessee Tax Rates & Rankings, 2026
- GunTransfers — FFL Transfer Fees by State, 2026 (national average about $35)