is there any belief that applying for PTA will ever go back to walk-in basis?
I heard a nasty rumor, from one of my shooting buddies, that some gunshop(s) have set up bots to regularly and routinely harvest any available PTA appts, and then resell them for $75. I'm not sure if this falls into the category of scalping, or Denial-of-Service attacks.
I'm pretty sure the current Karl Roads PTA appt system has got the anti-2A crowd giggling with glee. and this has been going on for over a year.
From what others posted and my own observation, it appears the booking system makes appointments available 90 days out to the minute, and since the appointment times are 10 minutes apart, the available times will appear every 10 minutes, too. So, on Monday at 9:00am, the appointment for 9:00am 90 days from then -- if it's a normal business day -- will be available to select online. The next one will become available at 9:10am, and so on.
While watching this process online, it took less than a minute for each and every appointment that became available to be booked. So, unless there are people at keyboards or phones grabbing appointments M-F 7:30-3:30 every 10 minutes, I have to believe there are bots, scripts or browser macros running that can go to the new appointments and book them without human interaction.
Would not be too difficult to identify the URLs for the appointment booking screens for every time slot and just go there and execute a booking script that fills in the form and submits it.
My other theory is there is someone with access to the system (Cop, IT techie, etc.) who reserves a block of appointments for the shops that pay them a "fee." If the appointments don't sell to gun buyers, the appointments can be canceled -- no cost to the insider or store.
Regardless, it's not likely IMO that a group of anti-gun people has been responsible for sitting in front of the website and booking appointments manually. The volume of appointments being generated all day every weekday seems too much for even the most zealous of gun haters for such a long period of time.
Our resident IT expert has stated he knows for a fact at least one LGS was selling appointment times. So, even without having his facts proven in a court of law, he's never wrong. Must be true!