If you run a range, a retailer, or a manufacturer in this industry, you’ve probably felt it this year: getting SMS approved as a firearms brand used to be the hard part. Now the hard part is staying approved.

Since January, carriers have moved the goalposts again. It’s no longer just about registering as a SHAFT (Sex, Hate, Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco) business and clearing the standard age-gate and disclosure requirements. Carriers are now filtering on individual words inside already-approved campaigns. AR-15. Suppressor. Even plain old “gun.” A message can come from a fully registered, fully compliant account and still get suppressed because a filter somewhere decided one word in the copy looked risky.

So if you’re a suppressor company, or you only make AR-15s, the obvious question is: how do you work around this. There isn’t one channel that solves it. There are several, and each one fits a different kind of firearms business. Here’s the breakdown, one channel at a time.

Broadly, you’re choosing between slow mail, which is email, and texting channels, which include Telegram, short codes, long codes, and toll-free numbers. Here’s how each one actually holds up.

1. Toll-Free Numbers: Skip These

We never recommend toll-free numbers for this industry, or honestly for most industries. Consumers have learned to treat toll-free texts as spam, open rates suffer for it, and the return on investment isn’t there. Cross this one off before you compare the rest.

2. Short Codes: Best for High Volume and Harder Approvals

A short code is the 5-6 digit number you’ve seen brands text from. The advantage is speed and scale: a short code can send around 30,000 messages a minute, which means high deliverability even on your biggest campaign days and real headroom for large campaign returns.

Short codes also go through a more hands-on approval process directly with the carriers, and that’s where a provider’s carrier relationships actually matter. We’ve gotten short code campaigns approved that wouldn’t fly on a regular 10DLC long code, because that approval isn’t automated the same way, it’s a real relationship with the carrier. That makes a short code a strong fit for manufacturers and franchises, or a franchise gun range: businesses with real volume, where the setup is worth it, and where having a provider who can sit across the table from a carrier and get a campaign approved is worth more than the extra cost.

3. Long Codes (10DLC) and Local Numbers: Good for Everyone, With a Catch

A local, 10-digit long code is a solid fit for most businesses in this space. The catch is that to get approved, you typically have to remove or temporarily restrict AR-15 and suppressor content from the website tied to that campaign. Carriers are scanning what’s linked, not just what’s texted.

That could shift, and fast. On August 5, 2026, U.S. District Judge James Wesley Hendrix in the Northern District of Texas ruled, in the consolidated cases Jensen v. ATF and Silencer Shop Foundation v. ATF, that the NFA’s registration and approval scheme for suppressors, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns, and AOWs is unconstitutional. The reasoning: Congress zeroed out the transfer and making tax on those items earlier this year, and once the tax was gone, so was the only constitutional basis the registration scheme ever had. Plaintiffs included Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, the NRA, Firearms Policy Coalition, several state rifle associations, and fifteen states. It doesn’t touch machine guns or destructive devices, and it doesn’t decide the Second Amendment question at all, the court didn’t need to.

Two things matter for how far this actually reaches right now. First, the relief is narrow: it protects the named plaintiffs, members of the plaintiff organizations, customers of a handful of specifically named companies, and the fifteen plaintiff states, not the general public. A customer or dealer outside those groups isn’t covered just because the ruling exists. Second, the judgment is stayed for seven days while the government decides whether to appeal to the Fifth Circuit, so as of this writing it isn’t in effect anywhere yet, and its earliest possible effective date is August 12.

Even with that narrow scope, we typically see the same pattern play out with carrier networks: when the legal landscape moves this decisively in the industry’s favor, even in a limited way, it gives us leverage as a company to push carriers to change their internal policies. Nothing changes overnight, but this is exactly the kind of shift worth watching closely over the next few weeks.

The Opt-In Bar Just Got Higher Too

Around three months ago, we also watched carriers stop treating a simple keyword opt-in as enough on its own for firearms campaigns. It used to be that texting a keyword like JOIN or RANGE, then confirming your date of birth in the reply thread, satisfied the age-gate requirement. Carriers are now asking for that same age gate twice: once on a dedicated opt-in web form, and again on the website that form lives on. A keyword flow by itself is no longer treated as sufficient proof of age verification for this category.

Practically, that means your opt-in form needs its own age confirmation step, separate from and in addition to whatever age gate already sits on your homepage. It’s more friction for the customer signing up, but it’s the price of staying inside the lines carriers are currently drawing, and those lines have only been getting stricter, not looser, all year.

4. Telegram: A New Channel, Not a Replacement

Telegram runs over the internet, not the carrier network, so none of the CTIA or carrier SHAFT restrictions apply to it. That’s exactly why we built it into OtterText for cannabis, CBD, and vape brands that get zero SMS access no matter what they do, and it’s exactly as useful for firearms businesses that want to say what they actually sell without rewriting every message around a keyword filter.

A natural question is why Telegram and not WhatsApp. WhatsApp is owned by Meta, and Meta prohibits firearm-related content outright. It has never been an option for this industry and it isn’t becoming one. Telegram doesn’t carry that restriction, which is part of why it’s become a real distribution channel outside of firearms too. Tucker Carlson’s team, for example, runs an official Telegram channel for show updates, separate from any Meta platform, because Telegram doesn’t police content the way Meta does.

Here’s the part worth underlining: inside OtterText, Telegram isn’t an either/or decision against your existing SMS number. You can run it as an additional channel on top of whatever short code, long code, or toll-free setup you already have. You’re not tearing anything out or migrating your list. You’re opening up a second, filter-proof line of communication that runs alongside the one you’ve already got, so the messages a carrier won’t let through on text can still go out on Telegram the same day.

The tradeoff is reach. Your list has to actually be on Telegram, and most firearms customer bases in the U.S. still default to a phone number first. It’s a genuinely strong channel to build deliberately, on top of what you’re already running.

5. Email: No Filter, No Registration, No Speed

Email has no SHAFT category and no carrier keyword filtering. You can say “AR-15” or “suppressor” or anything else with zero risk of a carrier silently dropping the message. It’s also the slowest channel to act on and has the lowest open rates of the group, so it’s best paired with something faster rather than used alone.

Putting It Together: Three Ways to Build Your Stack

It really comes down to what you sell and how much you’re willing to jump through carrier hoops versus just having free speech to market again. In practice, most firearms businesses land on one of three combinations:

• Telegram + Email: the path with the least carrier friction. Best for suppressor companies, AR-15 manufacturers, or anyone whose catalog reads as high-risk to a filter no matter how it’s worded.
• Short Code + Email: the path for volume. Best for manufacturers, franchises, and larger ranges that need the 30,000-a-minute throughput and can use the hands-on carrier approval to get more of their real content through.
• Local Number + Email: the standard path for a single-location retailer or range, with website content adjusted to pass carrier review.

And Telegram can be layered onto any of the three above, not just the first one. If you’re already running a short code or local number through OtterText, adding Telegram doesn’t replace that setup, it just gives you a second channel for the messages your existing number can’t carry.

Sign-up on the Telegram side is handled through simple online opt-in forms, so customers get direct access and can download Telegram right from the link, and you still get full link tracking and analytics, the same as you’d expect from text. Our Telegram and email plan runs unlimited Telegram messages plus up to 30,000 emails a month for $99, making it one of the more affordable ways to open that second channel without adding real cost.

This isn’t the last change carriers will make this year. The pattern since January has been enforcement getting more granular, not less, and there’s no reason to expect that to reverse. The businesses that will be fine six months from now are the ones building a channel mix today, not the ones waiting to see if the filters loosen back up.

OtterText Is the Firearms and SHAFT Texting Authority

Here’s the short version of everything above: firearms and SHAFT-category texting is one of the most specialized corners of compliance in the messaging industry, and most SMS providers don’t understand it well enough to keep a firearms business approved, let alone growing. OtterText does. Our onboarding specialists and sales team are trained specifically on SHAFT compliance, carrier registration, age-gating requirements, and the keyword and content restrictions that change how firearms brands can legally text, and they stay current as those rules shift, because in this industry they shift often.

That’s the difference when you book a demo or onboard with OtterText. You’re not explaining your industry to a provider who’s never handled it. You’re working with the team that firearms manufacturers, ranges, and retailers already rely on to get approved, stay approved, and reach customers through SMS, Telegram, and email, no matter what carriers change next.