King Busybody on Online Gun Sales

Bloomberg is publishing a misleading report about online gun sales, obviously targeting forums like GunBroker, GunsAmerica, and other far off corners of the Internets where people arrange deals. What he fails to mention is that it’s unlawful for private sales to proceed among people of different states without an FFL being involved, and that it’s unlawful for someone who is not a gun dealer to ship  firearm through US mail. I believe common carrier to someone in the same state as the seller is lawful in a private sale, but that’s a narrow category. Many of the sales Bloomberg claims to have attempted would be unlawful under existing law.

So qualifying this as a “vast and largely unregulated market for illegal guns,” is disingenuous, non-factual, and highly misleading, proving that even though MAIG may be picking up the mantle of gun control from previously failed groups, with an interesting twist and slick marketing, they are still not above sleight of hand and deception to try to make their case. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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11 thoughts on “King Busybody on Online Gun Sales”

  1. Someone should start an anonymous/ untraceable message board, and call it “facetoface.com” or something like that, for making arrangements for (legal) ftf transfers. That’ll set this fool straight!

  2. A few illegal sales do not constitute the rending of the fabric of society. I’d say statistically, his results are not significant, as 125 data points out of the thousands available is a pretty paltry sample.

    But bad is bad. So do like the first guy. Don’t be a felon.

  4. …and that it’s unlawful for someone who is not a gun dealer to ship firearm through US mail.

    Actually, non-FFL persons can ship long guns through the USPS. The addressee must either be themselves, an FFL holder or a resident of the same state regardless of license status.

  5. Bloomberg is on to something new because he’s had no success with his other recent projects. America doesn’t want to be run like East Germany or New York City. Imagine that!

  7. I liked that he used craig’s list as the big offender.. There are 300,0000 new posts to craig’s list and they found 1,700 over 100 days that where offereing firearms for sale. So not worrying that posts “live” for a while and assuming gun posts are reposts at the same level of posts in general, I get that about 0.005667% of the posts are about guns.

  8. What’s going on here is that Bloomberg is trying to support a big-city gun control fantasy: Scapgoating outsiders for a community’s problem.

    The real problem is failure to control dangerous and violent individuals, especially in big cities. But that’s politically unpopular and goes against liberal dogma. It’s more comforting to blame everything on those evil ol’ gun sellers elsewhere.

    There’s a lot of mythology in the gun control system, supported not by hard evidence but by a whole bunch of “obviously self-evident truths” that aren’t in fact true at all.

    BTW: Most recent numbers I’ve seen suggest that about 3 quarters of the guns used in street crime (non-domestic) are stolen.

  10. That was the most ridiculous hit piece article I’ve read in a long time (and I still read japete’s blog).

    Factual errors, and outright lies…good Gawd!

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