−27%
Palmetto State Armory
Glock 19 Gen5 MOS
$549.99
$399.99
View at retailer
We do not publish charts for that make yet
This is a refusal, and it is deliberate. The lookup only uses production charts that the manufacturer publishes itself, in a form that can be read and cited. Most makers do not publish one — and for those, no honest tool can give you a year.
Date your firearm by its serial number
Every result names the documented threshold it came from, so you can check the reasoning yourself.
Open the serial number lookupThe rule that decides coverage
A make is covered here only when the manufacturer publishes its own serial or date chart as a browsable table on its own support pages. That is the whole test, and it is strict. Everything else is declined, including some very large makers:
- Makers that publish nothing. Several major manufacturers tell customers to call or email customer service instead of publishing a chart. There is no table to transcribe, so there is nothing to cite.
- Makers whose lookup queries a server. A form that takes a serial and returns a year by calling an endpoint is not a published table. Transcribing it by automation would mean proxying someone else's service and depending on it staying up — so it is out of scope on principle.
- Charts that exist only as scanned images. Where a maker publishes its dates as a photographed or scanned document with no text layer, reading it means machine recognition of a picture of a table. That produces impossible dates and cannot be verified, so it is not shipped.
- Copyrighted compilations. The standard reference works on gun values and serialization are commercial editorial products. Their data is not ours to republish, and their scanned tables do not extract reliably in any case.
What we will not do. We will not guess a year from a surname match, from a model that looks similar, or from a number that happens to sit in a plausible range. Every result on this site names the documented threshold it came from. Where there is no threshold, there is no result.
Makes we do cover
Coverage grows one transcription at a time, and only when a maker's own published table can be read and cited:
That list is short, and it will stay short. Browsable official charts are genuinely rare — which is exactly why a tool that states its sources and its limits is worth more in this subject than one that answers everything.
Where to go for a make we cannot cover
- The manufacturer's own customer service. Many makers will search their records for a fee and issue a letter of authenticity. That letter is the document an insurer, an auction house or a transferee will accept, and it is the only authoritative answer.
- The historical foundation or museum for the brand. Where a maker's records were donated or sold — which happened to a number of historic American brands — a foundation or museum archive now holds them and runs the search service.
- The maker's own catalogue and model history. Where no serial records survive, production periods by model are still documented, and a model-level date is an honest answer where a serial-level one is not.
Our maker guides cover the history and the records situation of individual brands, including which of them still issue factory letters and where their archives are held.
Can I request that a make be added?
If the maker publishes its own chart as a browsable table, coverage follows automatically once it is transcribed — that is how the existing makes were added. If they do not publish one, no amount of requesting creates data, and we would rather tell you that than invent a year.
Could you use a third-party lookup service to cover more makers?
Technically yes, and we deliberately do not. It would mean depending on someone else's endpoint, publishing a result we cannot show the source for, and losing the property that makes this tool worth using at all: every answer traceable to a document.
Is a wider database of gun serial numbers available anywhere?
Not publicly. Stolen-firearm records sit in law-enforcement systems that only law enforcement can query, and manufacturer archives are private. No public service takes a serial number and returns an owner or a history. What is public is the production chart — narrow, and the only honest basis for dating a gun.