An open letter to Condé Nast: Please stop stamping the reddit logo on assault rifles, and please stop the sale of assault rifles and other guns on reddit. [Repost due to brigade]
Those that are regulars here know that reddit backs the sale of assault rifles, silencers, hollow point bullets, ultra-high capacity magazines (100-200 round drums) and explosives on reddit without supervision. In my last post, I took a snapshot of 100 gun transactions on reddit (about a week's worth) and found 29 sales related to assault rifles (as defined by the single characteristic test), 16 lbs of explosive powder (like the type used in the Boston Bombing), and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammuntion exchanging hands, with many redditors preferring to conduct transactions "face-to-face" in order to bypass background checks.
I make posts tallying and monitoring the transactions, then send invites directly to reddit's owners and admins to discuss it, and they decline. In the space of the last year, that negligence has turned reddit into the largest internet forum based arms trafficking market of high powered weaponry in the world.
There are also a multitude of transactions in which assault rifles and other guns are sold by anarchists/libertarians using the anonymous bitcoin payment system. As stated, reports of arms trafficking on reddit have been met with absolute silence by site owners and admins, even though the site falls under California's strict gun control laws. Meanwhile, the volume of these transactions has increased tremendously even since the fall of last year.
But it came as a surprise to me when I found out today that for over two years and running reddit also directly granted express written permission to stamp the reddit logo on assault rifles.
Here are pictures of some of the reddit assault rifles:
http://i.imgur.com/Hshkzfc.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/SkjekT8.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/6iAzVu9.jpg NEW
http://i.imgur.com/wTqjyEw.jpg NEW
http://i.imgur.com/B59uOwR.jpg NEW
http://i.imgur.com/YPQch5v.jpg NEW
I would be interested to know which brilliant legal mind authorized this. So far, 93 assault rifle receivers have been made bearing the reddit logo. The receiver is colloquially known as the "lower" and is the part of the assault rifle [considered the actual firearm by the ATF](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receiver_(firearms).
Building an assault rifle is likely easier than putting together a lot of Ikea furniture, and redditors do it because they can shave the cost of it to - $400-$600 - the cost of some handguns. In February of 2011, one redditor asked for, and received, permission from reddit admins to emblazen the logo on 39 assault rifles in the first batch received from a gun maker in Arizona called Double Diamond Law Enforcement Supply. But Double Diamond was slow to deliver on the order, and part way through the process demanded that the redditor receive permission from reddit in order to make the assault rifle receivers.
At that point, extensive negotiations took place between one or two Double Diamond employees (Jon Beaudry and Stuart Seymour), one redditor (/u/r1b4z01d), and Condé Nast. u/r1b4z01d complained that "Once we were all ready to pay they asked for permission to use the logo then I had to deal with convincing Condé Nast Digital to allow us to use the logo on the gun." Screencap Link. But apparently he was able to convince Condé Nast relatively easily, because he stated "I do have written permission from Conde Nast." Screenshot Link.
That batch of assault rifles shipped to 39 redditors months later. The next batch of 21 assault rifles was organized in September of 2011 and shipped around January of 2012 (here's the link to the sign up thread. The third batch was organized by a redditor who founded a subreddit mere days after Sandy Hook to promote assault rifle and high capacity mag proliferation on reddit. Many of their fanatical gun owners form picket lines on reddit and comb the new queues and downvote and comment, send death threats, and stalk redditors daily for months.
The larger concern is that redditors have killed themselves, and continue to kill themselves using guns. Reddit gun owners are largely comprised of young, rural, white males who are lonely and suffer from a combustible mix of depression and abuse of alcohol and other substances. None of them, including the young reddit admins, have exhibited an appreciable understanding of the science on either suicidal or homicidal impulse.
But Harvard shows that where there are more guns there are more homicides and suicides.
An extensive writeup on gun suicide can be found here. Impulse is the desire to commit suicide, and how that impulse is acted upon is what scientists describe as the means (e.g. using a gun). Guns allow redditors to act quickly on that impulse ('The Means Matter Theory'), and also prevent survival whereas other means are more difficult or time consuming. But if you survive for the duration of the impulse, 90% will not commit suicide again.
A researcher from Harvard speculated that "[p]erhaps it is not the presence of firearms, per se, but something about rural life … a character trait (such as self-reliance and an inclination to “go it alone”) that may be associated both with firearm ownership and suicide and it is this trait, not the presence of the gun, that leads to the association.
In other words, Harvard is saying the Tea Party/libertarian ideology is so toxic that it is killing the people who subscribe to it.
Whatever the case may be, if that gun owner fits the criteria above and is also a veteran, the suicide rate is astronomical. Many of those purchasing assault rifles today are the hundreds of thousands of lonely and depressed young veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and finding commonality by talking about guns on reddit.
This of course doesn't even begin to address firearm homicide or other crimes commited with guns. In other posts, I have directed reddit's attention to both the legal (it does not qualify for the protections that gun makers and gun stores receive) and moral obligations it owes (not participating in the killing of its users and protecting the general public from guns obtained on reddit, whether lawfully or unlawfully acquired).
In response, the usual comments from fanatical gun owners note that some interstate transactions are shipped to Federal Firearm Licensees and that some undergo background checks. But redditors try to circumvent this by posting they want "face-to-face" transactions, and can easily arrange the transactions for themselves. They then cross a state line and conduct a private sale because the sellers are not checking state identification (of course, they will swear otherwise). In addition the background check issue is really a distraction from whether reddit should be in the business of trafficking guns at all.
A one time background check does not predict whether a particular gun owner will participate in the 100,000 shootings each year over the next 60 years of his life.
But as reddit found out when it made the front page of the Huffington Post, one assault rifle with the reddit logo has already been sold in a face to face transaction without a background check.
At that time, neither reddit or Condé Nast came forward to clarify that they expressly endorsed the sale of assault rifles baring the reddit logo. Nor did they comment on Condé Nast's endorsement of the subreddit where hundreds of gun transactions are taking place each month, unmonitored and unsupervised by either Condé Nast or reddit. That's a shame. Because as Harvard research shows, more guns mean more homicides. And they certainly don't seem to care that they are participating in a secondary market where gun owners have shot 4.5 million people and managed to kill 1.34 million in only 45 years.
But reddit and Condé Nast do present a shining example of America's thoughtless gun culture. It seems that as always, someone has to die by homicide, suicide, or accident before some thought is given to the secondary gun market on reddit and elsewhere. Myself and other concerned redditors report gun owner shootings every day in r/gunsarecool, and don't want to see the reddit alien on a gun next to a pool of blood and an outstretched hand. Nor should reddit be in the business of selling a high volume of assault rifles, explosives, high capacity magazines, and tens of thousands of rounds of ammo.
But unfortunately, reddit has literally given it's corporate stamp of approval on assault rifles and high capacity magazines in America.
Sale 1:
[Full screencap of each sale thread is available]
Sale 2:
Sale 3:
Big thanks to crack mods /u/Gnome__Chompsky for pulling together pictures of the rifles and /u/Im_gumby_damnit for digging for some information as well.
For the record, here is the link to contact reddit's admins:
http://www.reddit.com/feedback/
Are your submissions not showing up? Subreddit marked as spam? Is the spam filter acting up? Send a private message to the admins.
Clicking on "Send a private message to the admins" leads to this link: http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%2Fr%2Freddit.com
I went to that page, wrote the admins a message, and took this screencap of it:
http://i.imgur.com/OQvDEAc.jpg
Then I clicked the send button. Here is the message delivery confirmation.
Posted Aug 13, 2013, 8:30 PM UTC · edited