Some NYT reporters checked into on-line gun sales and learned this:
Meanwhile, The New York Times went online to see how the process of Internet gun sales works, and to uncover the identity of sellers and buyers. What reporters Michael Luo, Mike McIntire and Griff Palmer discovered was that online gun sites are an easy place for people illegally allowed to buy or sell guns to make a quick deal.
Mostly using the site Armslist, the reporters began responding to ads, and found a convicted felon, a fugitive, and a repeat offender trying to buy or sell firearms. They also discovered one seller who has advertised more than 100 guns, and another that has advertised more than 80. Over the past three months, the paper “identified more than 170,000 gun ads on Armslist.”
“The examination of Armslist raised questions about whether many sellers are essentially functioning as unlicensed firearms dealers, in contravention of federal law,” they write. The reporters site a A 2011 undercover investigation by the City of New York that examined “private party gun sellers on a range of Web sites, including Armslist, to see if they would sell guns to someone who said that they probably could not pass a background check, and found 77 of 125 online sellers agreed to sell the weapons anyway.”
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