 Hi, and welcome to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission's webinar on toy, look-alike, and imitation firearms, presented by the Small Business Ombudsman Team and recorded in September of 2023. Please note that this presentation was prepared by CPSC staff and may not necessarily reflect the views of the Commission. Products shown are only for demonstration purposes and do not constitute endorsement. Okay, let's take a look at the presentation agenda for today. First we'll start with an overview of the historical and legal background for this product category. And then we'll have a very fast and quick overview of children's product requirements. And please note that this presentation is designed primarily for products that are considered general use products and not intended for children's products, but we are going to have a quick overview of what those would be in case there are any children's product toy manufacturers watching this video. Okay, so how do we define look-alike firearm and what would be inside and outside of the scope of that requirement? How do you comply with those requirements? Going over each different possible ways to comply. And then going over the waiver for a theatrical movie and television industry. And then that'll be kind of the first half of this presentation. And the second half of the presentation will focus primarily on the GCC requirement, the general certificate of conformity requirement, along with an overview of our current temporary enforcement discretion and a step-by-step walkthrough of each section and telling you how to build that document yourself. And then lastly we'll cover some business resources and things that you all can look at after this presentation is over to continue learning about CPSC requirements. Okay, the historical and legal background, these requirements actually come back all the way from 1988 when Congress passed Public Law 100-615, which did get codified at 15 USC 5001. The authority at that time was granted to the U.S. Department of Commerce or referred to just as DOC. Even in May of 1989, they issued a regulation, 15 CFR 272, which laid out these requirements for imitation firearms. Now going fast-forwarding all the way to last year, Congress updated those requirements and replaced the DOC's authority with that of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, our agency, the CPSC. And in May of this year in 2023, CPSC continued DOC's program by issuing a direct final rule codified at 16 CFR 1272. The rule did not make any substantive changes, as we'll get into, to the DOC rule that has been in place since 1989. So for all intents and purposes, the transfer and power from the Department of Commerce to the CPSC has had no major substantive impacts on the actual requirement itself. Now there is a new requirement with the GCC and that's what we're going to get into in the second half of this presentation, but the actual requirement related to the imitation firearm itself has not changed. Okay, quick overview of children's product requirements. Again, this presentation is not intended to focus on children's products. However, toy guns or toy imitation firearms that are primarily intended for children 12 years of age and younger must comply with the following requirements. Now number one, there is a very specific toy gun marking requirement in the toy standard section 4.30. That is the counterpart section to 16 CFR 1272. Additionally those toy guns or toy imitation firearms would have to comply with any other applicable sections from the toy standard. In addition to that, there are a series of generally applicable children's product requirements that apply to many children's products, including toy guns or toy imitation firearms. That would be the total lead content limit, the lead in paint ban, if applicable. So if the product has paint, then that 16 CFR part 1303 requirement would apply. If it's not painted, then it wouldn't apply, it's that simple. The phthalates limits, which apply to all plasticized component materials of children's toys, found at 16 CFR part 1307, again, kind of similar to the lead in paint ban. If you don't have plasticized components in your products, it just doesn't apply. And then the last two items here, tracking label information, which is a requirement mandating a certain amount of information on both the product and the packaging of the children's product, as well as production of a children's product certificate or a CPC, which is very similar to the GCC requirements that we're going to be talking about later in this presentation. So what are toy look-alike and imitation firearms? Toy look-alike and imitation firearms are any devices that have the appearance, shape, and or configuration of a firearm. As stated in 15 USC 5001, which we referenced earlier, the term quote-unquote look-alike firearm includes the following terms, toy guns, water guns, replicant non-guns, and airsoft guns firing non-metallic projectiles. So the next series of slides will have some pictures, graphical representations of what these products are and how you can tell if your product is subject to these requirements for toy look-alike and imitation firearms, or maybe they're not. So here are a few toy guns. All of these would be compliant toy guns with the toy gun markings 4.30 of the KSTM F96 toy standard, as well as 16 CFR part 1272, which kind of mirror each other. And we'll get into some reasonings later as to why these would be considered compliant. But these are compliant toy guns, and you can see there's a lot of different variations. The requirements do allow for creativity and flexibility with production of these products. So I wanted to demonstrate a series of different styles to make that clear. Water guns that are pretty straightforward, replicant non-guns, so firearms, imitation firearms that look very similar to a real firearm. In this case, I believe this is a rubber, maybe a combination of rubber and plastic, and looks like it could be a real firearm. And you see this orange blaze, orange tip at the end. So we'll get into more on what that is, and how that speaks to compliance with respect to this rule. But this is basically what we would mean, what this statute means by replica non-gun. So non-firing replica of imitation firearm, essentially, is what we're talking about here. And the last category here, airsoft guns firing non-metallic projectiles. So you can see a nice kind of overview presentation here of what could constitute someone's airsoft gun with their plastic pellets, maybe some safety gloves, safety goggles. Well, we always recommend safety goggles when doing sporting activities like this. No one wants to get their eye damaged or injured. And so what are not considered toy, look-alike, and imitation firearms? The term look-alike firearm does not include, quote unquote, non-firing collector replica antique firearms. That is a long term. We'll get into what that is in a second. Traditional BB paintball or pellet firing air guns, and then decorative ornamental and miniature objects that have the appearance of a firearm and measure no more than 38 millimeters by 70 millimeters. Again, we're going to have some pictures here in a second of what these terms are, so that you'll have a better sense of visual representation and sense of what products are not covered inside the scope of 60 and CFR 1272. So here's a picture of a non-firing collector replica antique firearm. So essentially what this is, it's kind of similar to the replica non-gun that we saw earlier in the sense that it is a replica of an actual firearm. However, it is a firearm produced, I believe this is something from several hundred years ago. So obviously if you had this gun, no one's going to think it's an actual firing rifle or musket pistol, right? So these types of replica antique firearms are not subject to these requirements and do not have to comply with 60 and CFR 1272. Traditional BB and pellet firing air guns that are firing metallic projectiles are not considered subject to these rules and requirements. You can see a young boy here firing his BB gun. These types of guns and firearms would not be subject. And then paintball guns as well are carved out. There was some confusion in the community with when these rules were announced as to the status of paintball guns. Paintball guns are outside of the scope. They are not covered. So if you are in the market of producing, importing, manufacturing paintball guns, they are not subject to these requirements and would not have to comply with 16 CFR 1272. And lastly here we have decorative ornamental and or miniature objects that have the appearance of a firearm. This is a very example of this picture of this very tiny handgun over the picture of Benjamin Franklin on the $100 bill. So obviously this is so small, no reasonable person would assume that this is a real firearm that could fire an actual projectile. So now that we've talked about what types of products are in scope, what types of products are out of scope, for the products that are in scope, how do they comply with 16 CFR 1272. And again, these requirements have essentially are unchanged from the Department of Commerce rule that passed in 1989, just so we're clear. So as that rule stated, as our rule states, one of the ways to comply is by having a blaze orange solid plug permanently affixed to the imitation firearm in one of two potential ways. It could be attached to the muzzle end of the barrel as an integral part of the entire device and recessed. It could also be attached and affixed permanently to the exterior surface of the barrel, covering the circumference of the barrel from the muzzle end. Also important to note here too is that you can see this plug here on your screen and also the text is actually the blaze orange color itself. We color matched that for this presentation. And so it is important to note here that orange color is brighter than blaze orange or loud or accepted. So you don't have to go with blaze orange if it's brighter. Maybe it's a neon orange, maybe it's a little paler, maybe it's brighter. As long as it's at least blaze orange or brighter, you would still be compliant. And a lot of people ask us about permanently affixed and permanently affixed, essentially from what we would understand it to be, you're essentially would have to damage the gun, break the gun in some way in order to remove that plug. That is what we mean by permanently affixed. So that is important to keep in mind. But if you're not sure about what would constitute permanently affixed, what we mean by blaze orange or brighter, what we mean by the muzzle end of the barrier, the barrel or the exterior surface of the barrel, any of these terms, if you're not sure how those terms would work with respect to your products, please feel free to give us a call or contact information is available at the end of this presentation. But I'll give it now and I'll give it a few times throughout this presentation. You can call us at any point, it's 301-504-7945, our email address is SBO at CPSC.gov. We want to get your questions. This is part of why we're giving this presentation today is because we want to interface with you. We want to help you understand what you need to do to comply and so that you don't get in trouble. You don't run afoul of our compliance office, our Office of Import Surveillance. We want to make sure you're doing everything correctly and if you have any questions or any doubt about how to do that, how to comply, please, please get in touch with us. We want to hear from you. We want to help you out. All right. So that aside, let's go on and look at a couple of actual examples. We saw these pictures earlier. So you can see the boy on the left holding a couple of toy pistols. And you can see the one on the left is a couple of things, one, an orange color brighter than blaze orange, which is a lot brighter. And then it's also covering the out. It's around the barrel preventing a projectiles being fired. And the one on the right that we talked about earlier is the replica non-gun, which has the blaze orange plug recessed into the gun. So these are the two different types of compliance pieces that we were talking about on the previous page. So I wanted to highlight these two different actual examples for you. So you had a good example of what those were looking like graphically, because the way that legal text is written, it can be kind of confusing and complicated to understand. And again, that is why we are here. This is the purpose of the small business ombudsman team to try to break down these complicated concepts into plain language for everyone. Okay. Other ways to comply. There are a couple of other ways here listed in the regulation. A construction of the device entirely of transparent or translucent materials, which permits unmistakable observation of the device's complete contents. So this is kind of a fun toy gun here that has that completely transparent operation. And so that would be complying with this with this transparent or translucent requirements. Here's a nice example of that. And lastly, coloration of the entire exterior surface of the device in white, bright red, bright orange, bright yellow, bright green, bright blue, bright pink, as we're seeing here, and this assault rifle, or bright purple, either singly or as the predominant color in combination with other colors in any pattern. We actually saw a toy gun earlier was a yellow pistol that had a lot of bright colors mixed in. That's how that one would be compliant. That one didn't have an orange plug, but it did have all of these very bright colors, right? So that is something to be aware of. But again, we'll call this pink assault rifle subject to these requirements, meeting it based on without the orange plug or without being transparent, it is meeting it based upon this bright coloration. Okay. What about for folks in the theatrical movie or television industry? Obviously, you all don't want orange plugs or bright colors in your films when you're trying to make a very realistic scene for a movie, for a film, for TV. So what do you do? Firms can request a waiver from the requirements of 16CFR Part 1272 for products that would be used only in the theatrical movie or television industry. That's really important. That's one of those purposes. If you were to use them for other purposes, they would have to comply with 1272. Request for a waiver must be made in writing and be mailed with the physical sample of the product along with this warrant affidavit. So first step you should do, though, before you mail anything, before you do anything is email regulatoryenforcement.cpsc.gov with your situation and ask them how they want to proceed with you is what I would recommend. So email regulatoryenforcement.cpsc.gov just like it's stated here on your screen and then ask how do they go, how do we go about getting the waiver here. You can also put us on that email if you want or let us know again, sbo.cpsc.gov if you want to get us involved as well. We're happy to help or if you have questions, we're happy to help, as stated earlier. Okay, so that's, we're kind of done with the first half of this presentation now. Now we're moving on to the second half of this presentation where we're going to be talking about general certificates of conformity or GCCs and what that requirement's all about, how it works very specifically for products in this imitation firearm industry, the airsoft industry, and what those folks have to do. So requirements for GCCs are contained at 16 CFR part 1110 and they are codified at 15 USC 2063, which is part of the Consumer Product Safety Act, our main statute. This document, the GCC document, which is just a one page work document essentially, must be issued by the quote unquote manufacturer. And the reason why it's in quotes is because the term manufacturer is defined in our act, our Consumer Product Safety Act, to include both domestic manufacturers and or importers, depending on who is the responsible US based party. So if we're talking about a imitation firearm produced in Wyoming, domestic manufacturer be certifying compliance, issue their GCC, and then that would be that situation. Or if it's a product produced overseas and there is a US import based importer, then that importer would be also considered the quote unquote manufacturer term can be kind of confusing and it's not intuitive at all. So I would say this if you're not sure about who is the responsible party. Give us a call, you lay out all the players who's involved and we can let you know who's the one that needs to issue the GCC. It's required for import distribution or sale of regulated consumer products in the United States and it's designed to act as a document that certifies compliance with the CPSC requirements. Think of it like an executive summary, a one page document that demonstrates your product and how it complies with applicable requirements. That is the point of this requirement. It must be legible and in English at a minimum. You could put it in other languages too. There's nothing prohibiting that. At a minimum it must be in English for much more in depth information on testing and certification in general, go to CPSC.gov slash certify you see that button down here. We can't click the button if you're watching the video, but pop that into your browser CPSC.gov slash certify, you know, get a whole huge wealth of information about testing and certification in general for CPSC requirements. Okay, I did mention alluded to issuing GCCs for imitation firearms or airsoft firearms in this with respect to these requirements. However, for the time being, as of the recording of this video in September of 2023, there is a temporary enforcement discretion in place. So the CPSC Office of Compliance and Field Operations has exercised enforcement discretion and for a transitional period will not pursue enforcement action against manufacturers, importers or private labelers of lookalike and imitation firearms. For any failure to certify or to issue, provide or make available to the commission a GCC pursuant to the CPSA, the Consumer Product Safety Act. And this enforcement discretion will remain in effect until January 1st, 2024. Also important to note that this discretion does not impact any other requirements under the law. So if you'd like to be complying with 16CFR1272, if you're subject to it, you just, we wouldn't be penalizing you for failing to issue a GCC at this time. So but once January 1st, 2024 rolls around, unless that enforcement discretion is extended, which is theoretically possible unless it's extended, you would be responsible for both complying with 16CFR1272 and also producing the GCC if you didn't want to be have be subject to a potential violation from the CPSC. There is an enforcement discretion letter online. We have a business guidance page online for imitation toy lookalike and imitation firearms. All of the information is listed on our website at cpsc.gov. Okay, so what is a GCC and what elements are there that I have to be worried about? How do I construct this document? If you're feeling lost right now with what this is, you're feeling overwhelmed or stressed out. I'm going to take some time, walk you through step by step and make it really easy. All right. It's seven, it's seven elements. First thing you do is you take those seven elements, you copy and paste them into a Word document. You write general certificate of conformity at the top or GCC and then you start filling out each section one through seven. If you want to be able to just copy and paste these elements easily for yourself, you go to cpsc.gov. They are also listed in the regulation that I mentioned earlier, 60 and CFR part 1110. But we recently revised our GCC page, so it's got a lot of new helpful information. It's got a couple of new updated examples to really help you with what it's supposed to look like. All right, so let's jump in to each element. I'm going to walk through it one by one to show you what's going on and what's expected for each element when you're producing this, again, temporary enforcement discretion in place through January 2024, January 1st, 2024. After that point, it's like normal situation. So production of a GCC and compliance with 60 and CFR 1272 would be required and would be expected if you didn't want to receive a violation for that failure to produce a GCC. Okay. So again, element number one, this is probably the easiest one, describe the product or products covered by the certification in enough detail to match their certificate to each product it covers and no others. Reminder, you don't need a separate GCC for each individual product you produce or import. One certificate can be used to certify multiple products. This will lessen the paperwork burden from the GCC requirements. So if you're staring down a huge list of products, maybe you make 100 different models of imitation firearms or airsoft guns or whatever it may be, you can group them into smaller categories so that you're not producing 100 separate documents. Maybe you're just producing a handful of documents and you're just breaking them up into categories that make sense. Maybe you're breaking them up into categories based on the production dates. Maybe you're breaking them up into categories based on when you did your, we'll get into this in a minute, your reasonable testing program. Maybe you will group them together based upon the type of the firearm or the type of the product. There's all kinds of different ways to be grouping them together to reduce the burden to you so you don't have to produce 100 or 1000 or however many different models you're making. That's not the point here. The point is not to bury you in paperwork. The purpose is to have a document that's representative of your product and a demonstration of how it's compliant with CPSU requirements. That's kind of the point, a one-page summary of your product and its compliance. Section 2 or element 2, for a quote unquote general use airsoft rifle or other general use imitation firearm, this is the citation you want, 16 CFR part 1272, marking of toy look alike in imitation firearms. You don't technically need the text. You really just need the legal citation. However, you might want the text just to make it crystal clear. Element 2 should be very, very simple for any general use airsoft rifles or other imitation firearms in this space. You should only have that one citation listed for those folks. Any children's product producers that we talked about earlier would have far more citations here and a lot more going on just as an FYI. We're really just talking about the general use products in this section here. Element 3, the identification of the importer or domestic manufacturer certifying compliance of the product. We talked about this earlier about how manufacturer actually equals importer or domestic manufacturer. In this case, you're providing the name, the full address, and telephone number of the importer or domestic manufacturer certifying the product. The importer must issue the product for products manufacturer it receives and the US manufacturer must issue the certificate for products manufactured domestically. Please note, and this is really important, this is why I put this in red, in cases when an importer issues the certificate, the importer does not need to be located physically within the United States, nor do they need to list a US-based address to comply with elements 3 and 4 of the certificate. That is really important. If you're physically located in Canada, you're a registered importer, then that is absolutely acceptable that you would have a Canadian address and be located in Canada. That is absolutely acceptable if that is your scenario. If there's any doubt about how this works, if you have any questions at all about filling this document out, producing a GCC, making sure you get it right, please give us a call, send us an email. Contact information for the individual maintaining records of the test results on this one's kind of misleading sense for the imitation firearms 16CF or 1272, there is no specific laboratory testing. However, what makes the most sense here, a couple of things, it's going to be a responsible person at the company that can talk about compliance and that kind of governmental stuff at your company that's responsible maybe for QA and QC stuff, that person who is responsible if we, the government, either CPSC or maybe US Customs and Border Protection, has questions for the company, like who should be the point of contact. That's really what this is getting at, especially in this situation where there's not going to be probably in a lot of situations a formalized test report. It's so important to note here that this would also be the person responsible for a reasonable testing program for the products, and this is again for general use imitation firearms where the product does not require formalized laboratory testing. I want to make that super clear that expensive costing testing with a private laboratory is not required for general use imitation firearms or general use airsoft rifles. That is really important to make that clear, that there is not an additional testing burden placed upon manufacturers and importers in this category. Now there are things you have to do, this quote unquote reasonable testing program, I'm talking about that in a little bit, what that is to ensure that there is a compliant product hitting the marketplace, but you do not have to be testing at a third party private laboratory. That is something children's products would have to do, but not generally use products. Date and place for those products are manufactured, element number five. For the date when the products are manufactured, provided at least a month and year. And for the place of manufacture, you're providing the city and state, maybe the administrative region, the country, or the product was manufactured or finally assembled. If the same manufacturer operates in one location, you want to provide the appropriate address of the factory. So this is pretty straightforward where and when was the product produced. And so for here, you might be updating it from batch to batch, or maybe you're adding additional batch dates to your certificate. So that might be how you're actually doing this. So say you're producing a batch in September of 2023 and a batch in March of 2024, you might update it in March of 2024 just to include that additional date, assuming the location is the same. It might be how you go about doing that. So those are accounted for, or you might just issue a brainless certificate with all the information kind of intact and just changing this piece and just do a new version that way. There's different ways to do it. You want to make sure it's accurate and accounting for the different batches and production ones that are being produced for your products. Okay. So this is again, going to be a little bit confusing perhaps for folks in this category, it says provide the dates and place when the product was tested for compliance with these consumer product safety rules. Okay. So we're really, again, just talking about 16 CFR parts, 12.72 for these general use products and certification, again, does not need to be based upon third-party laboratory testing. Those products have to undergo third-party testing for any applicable requirements, but not for this requirement so much probably. It really just depends on the situation, toy guns, subject to the toy standard would have to meet third-party testing there, but for general use products, third-party laboratory testing not required. So how do you prove compliance? Because you still have to verify and prove compliance. That is part of the requirement here. So certification for imitation programs can be based upon an internal compliance review known formally within the law as a reasonable testing program. We actually have a reasonable testing program FAQ, which is available on that cpsc.gov slash certify business guidance page that we talked about earlier, cpsc.gov slash certify is where you can find these reasonable testing program FAQs. You can also probably Google reasonable testing program FAQ, cpsc, and it probably come up for you. So what is that? What do we mean we say internal compliance review? It could be something as simple as you have someone or maybe several someones checking to see that your, let's say you're making replica non-guns like those black pistols with the orange plugs. You're checking to make sure those are actually permanently fixed, maybe you're checking every so many. Random checking to make sure those are done correctly, that they're permanently fixed, that they're not coming out. Could be random spot checks. It could be someone that's reviewing the production design itself to ensure that the design is meeting one of those four ways of complying. And so it's not having to go out to a third party unless you want to, you know, that is absolutely your choice. But it's at a minimum having some kind of internal review of those products to ensure that they're meeting kind of one of those four criteria that we talked about earlier. And so this is where you would describe that process. Like what are you doing? Who's doing it? When did they do it? Or maybe it's an ongoing process. I mean, this is something that's ad hoc or maybe it's something that's, hey, every 100 firearms is pulled off one and checked spot checked to make sure that it's, you know, the orange plug is permanently affixed or that the coloration is the right coloration. You know, something like that. Okay, this is the last element. So for this one, you are not putting down most likely a third party laboratory information. Then you would either leave this blank or just put NA. So anybody doing kind of an internal quality assurance review of compliance instead of laboratory testing is leaving this section blank or putting NA. Again, 16C of part 1272 does not include any testing methodologies or testing requirements that would need to be performed by an outside laboratory. So again, this section is probably blank for you. And that's okay. We would expect that and understand that for your products. But again, if you're not sure about anything that's required in GCC, please give us a call, send us an email. Okay, what do you do with it? Now you've created it. Again, creating, maybe let's pretend it's January 10th of 2024. You've created this document or maybe a series of documents for your airsoft rifles. What do you do now? Okay, the certificates must be created before importing or consumption or warehousing or distributing products in the US interstate commerce. This would not be retroactive to the enforcement discretion period. Just so you know, as soon as the enforcement discretion period is over, it doesn't just become then retroactive. You know, we're moving forward at that point. Certificates must quote unquote accompany each product or shipment of products covered by the same certificate. Now, I'm going to talk about it on the next slide. But before everyone gets concerned about having to put a piece of paper in every single box, there is a way to do this electronically that is allowed under the regulation. Same thing with products that must be furnished, with the certificates that must be furnished to each distributor or retailer of the product. Again, accompanying and furnishing can be done electronically, as I'll say on the next page. There's no requirement to provide it to the ultimate and consumer. So the folks that are using your products, enjoying your products, going out and playing competitive airsoft games, they don't have to receive that GCC document. Only the retailer or distributor would be entitled to that GCC. A copy of the certificate must be made available to the CPSC and US Customs and Border Protection within 24 hours upon its request. Again, so we mentioned electronic certificates. Here it is. Electronic certificates do satisfy the company and the furnished requirements I mentioned earlier. Electronic certificates must be reasonably accessible via a website URL or other electronic means, such as email. They must be created before shipment or first distribution within the United States. And they must contain a date of creation or last modification. That's really important. So you want to make sure it's time-stamped, dated, version history, all that kind of stuff. And that's what we have for today. So we gave you an overview of 16 CFR 1272, the toy lookalike and imitation firearms requirements. And we gave you an overview of the GCC requirements and reminding everyone that there is temporary enforcement discretion for GCCs through January 1st of 2024. You need to get in touch with us here as our contact information, as we talked about earlier, SBO at cpsc.gov, or call us anytime 301-504-7945. We don't answer, please leave a voicemail and be sure to call you back. If you want to stay up to date on future happenings, if you are interested in finding out, hey, is the commission doing anything else in my product category, sign up for business education alerts at cpsc.gov slash email. And we send out a monthly newsletter generally at the last week of the month. And that will recap any happenings that the commission, that's happened with the commission level, trainings or videos that we produce are going to go in there. So it's a good way to stay up to date on everything CPSC. We don't spam you, again, it's once a month, if you want to stay informed on what's going on with CPSC. This video is going to be available on our CPSC YouTube channel and our business education playlist. There's our CPSC webinar series. If you go to youtube.com forward slash US CPSC, you'll be able to find all of our videos. Also, we didn't talk about it today, but I'll talk about it right now, our regulatory robot tool at business.cpsc.gov slash robot, very helpful tool. You can go online, figure out the potentially applicable requirements in place for your products, whether it's these products or something else. All of the CPSC's requirements are listed in there. It is listed in several different languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Korean and several others. And all of our other information is available on the CPSC business education page, cpsc.gov slash business education. And I also mentioned earlier cpsc.gov slash certify. Thank you again for watching today. Please be in touch with us. If you have any more questions, we are happy to help you understand these things. Please let us know if there's anything else that we can do to help you out.