Gun trafficking on reddit. Out of the last 100 posts, assault rifle sales, high cap mags, ammo, and gun powder dominate.

After the recent stunning NY Times' expose of Armlist.com, a website that like reddit does not supervise arms trafficking, I decided to take a quick look at gun trafficking on r/gunsforsale. (Note redditor and Virginia Tech survivor Colin Goddard, who yesterday appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher, chimed in to support background checks).

Like in Armslist's wrongful death suit, reddit would not be shielded from liability by laws that protect licensed arms dealers or manufacturers if a redditor negligently sold a gun to a criminal or killed himself with one that was unlawfully purchased, which is a reasonably foreseeable consequence of unregulated sales.

At least, it was a reasonably foreseeable consequence to the owners of Craigslist, which realized the danger of providing an unstructured environment for interstate arms trafficking and completely banned them. Amazon and EBay obviously realize this and take strict precautions to regulate transactions that take place there - not only because that is the moral thing to do in that they don't want their customers getting killed - but it is the reasonable thing for a website owner to do when interstate gun sales are at issue.

Reddit's attorney does not practice second amendment tort law or criminal law, and she is not admitted to practice in the 29 of the 30 jurisdictions in which reddit could be sued based solely on these last 100 posts alone, nor is she familiar with the widely varying local laws that are being called into play by each transaction at issue.

This post serves not only to educate our community, but also to educate her as well as to provide notice to the admins that these transactions are taking place. On at least one other occasion, each admin was personally private messaged about other gun sales taking place on reddit, including one internet FFL who was attempting to sell 8 assault rifles on reddit. His FFL license is available to admins upon request.

This post will also be sent to the admins using the reddit contact form with the title "There is unsupervised gun trafficking taking place on reddit". And if we become aware of a shooting, whether murder or attempted murder, suicide or accidental shooting from a gun that has been sold on reddit we will forward this post as well as the other information we have to reddit's opposing counsel in the hopes that it will become an exhibit to ensure that reddit will fully compensate the victim of its willful neglect.

The reddit admins have been aware of this danger for a long time and have done nothing to stop it, and the killing that takes place from it is completely foreseeable and preventable. Two assault rifles have been sold on reddit bearing the reddit logo, one of which was sold out of the trunk of a car in a face to face transaction without a background check. That face to face transaction actually made the national news when the Huffington Post picked up the story. One anarcho-libertarian has even tried to sell an assault rifle using the anonymous bitcoin payment system.

Reddit gun sales have been steadily increasing as radicalized users become aware of the gun proliferation taking place here. I would say in the last 7 months alone, in my own anecdotal opinion and without resorting to hyperbole, they have increased from 10-20 times the volume of September 2012.

Just like the Times article, many of the ads on reddit expressly call for "face to face transactions" which allow the users to exchange guns for cash without having to check IDs. Many also express a willingness to drive long distances, a worrying development that I haven't seen in the ads before. In other words, since the gun seller is not checking IDs, the buyer could just cross the border into the neighboring state to purchase the murder weapon there.

Of course, every seller will totally swear to using telepathy on the buyer to see if they are felons first, or that they will only ship to a FFL, but by and large reddit is a ticking time bomb waiting to go off. Literally.

Here are the highlights of only the last 100 posts:

• 16 lbs of gun powder for sale, no background check required, just like that used in the Boston Marathon bombing.

• Assault rifle transactions dominated the sales, composing 29 of the posts, of those 9 high powered assault rifles were completed. Combined, those sales outnumbered sales of shotguns, hunting rifles, pistols, reloading equipment, sights, and mags.

• Number of high cap mags for sale: 65

• Number of rounds available for purchase without a background check: 6,179

• Hand guns: 13

• Shotguns: 2

• Hunting rifles: 5

• Lasers, scopes, sights: 6, Reloading Equipment: 3, Triggers: 1.

• Just like in the Times article, it appears that FFLs are using reddit to conduct arms transactions in volume and may be posing as private sellers. This can be inferred from the volume of transactions by certain users, and the types of weapons and components they are selling.

Most of the posts are from rural gun owners, even those posting in blue states. However, reddit's record keeping is so poor that it is impossible to completely verify. Here is a handy graph showing gun ownership vs gun deaths by state. Here is the Harvard data backing that up

Now, compare that graph with this chart of the breakdown of transactions per state (with red vs blue states sorted out) for an understanding of where and how gun violence occurs due to transactions like these on reddit. Thanks to u/Im_gumby_damnit for creating this breakdown as well as reporting the other graph above.

State data by transaction number:

FL 10

CA 9

TX 8

VA 7

PA 6

WA 6

OH 5

KS 4

NC 4

WI 3

IL 3

AZ 3

AR 3

WY 2

GA 2

NY 2

OK 2

NJ 2

MN 2

WV 2

CO 2

MI 2

SC 2

LA 2

MA 1

NH 1

AL 1

RI 1

ID 1