
Facebook Moves to Ban Private Gun Sales on Its Site - aaronbrethorst
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/30/technology/facebook-gun-sales-ban.html
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dhfuehxhf
Am I the only liberal out there that thinks it's hypocritical to push gun
control measures because we have modern police forces, but in the same breath
protest police brutality and the encroachment of the police state?

Hell, even Marx advocated widespread gun ownership as an implicit reminder for
those in power that they had to be accountable for their actions.

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bcook
Those in power have attack helicopters. My Glock is useless against that.

Edit: This post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I had no idea it was such a hot-
button issue.

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staunch
I didn't downvote you, but this is one of those ignorant arguments that only
survives because it sounds clever.

1\. You only need guns good enough to take over an armory.

2\. There are tens of millions of armed veterans in the U.S, and most (if not
all) active solders would side with The People.

3\. Every rebel group in history has had lesser weapons at first (see: Rome's
Servile Wars, American revolution, Cuban revolution, Afghanistan, Iraq, ISIS,
Syria, etc).

~~~
brandonmenc
Also:

4\. Some portion of the military would join the civilians, and bring their
military toys along for the fight.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
I believe that your #4 is the same as staunch's #2.

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staunch
My fault. I edited my comment before seeing his.

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koenigdavidmj
The only kind of private sale that is legal is actually physically meeting
with the person and giving it to them. If you're mailing it, you have to give
it to a gun shop near you, who mail it to a gun shop near the recipient, and
they do a background check of the person before the last hop.

~~~
aggieben
That's pretty much how FB sales go.

A: "I have this gun I"ll sell for $400." B: "I will buy it from you." A: "Ok.
Let's meet at the police station parking lot. What time is good for you?" B:
"How about 5:30?" A: "Ok, see you there."

~~~
gravypod
Yes, but these sales should be otherwise legal with records of the transaction
now kept by Facebook.

Most states require you to show firearms purchaser IDs, called FID in my home
state as well as a drivers license.

To acquire a FID, you need to go through a background check. This is how you
are meant to know if the person is "safe to sell to".

If people in state X have a problem with that, then they should get together
and find a solution to it.

Until then I don't think I can justify to myself censoring an otherwise
completely legal discussion, especially when such a discussion can be used as
a record of a sale that would otherwise not be present.

That's just my two cents.

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refurb
_Most states require you to show firearms purchaser IDs_

Minor point, but there aren't that many states that have firearm purchaser
IDs. NY, NJ, MA, IL are a few, but most states don't require anything more
than a driver's license.

~~~
gravypod
That's why I did say "If people in state X have a problem with that, then they
should get together and find a solution to it."

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com2kid
Another possible headline:

 _Facebook complies with request by US Government to ban certain types of
perfectly legal speech_

Doesn't sound quite so nice.

~~~
krapp
I am not a lawyer but I don't believe selling guns without background checks
is entirely legal in the US, so fearmongering aside, the government might have
a point, however tenuous it might be.

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dexwiz
If you are an arms dealer of some sort you have to do checks. You do not if
you are doing personal sales.

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Pxtl
And this is why Americans look crazy to much of the rest of the world.

I understand owning guns. I don't understand taking libertarian ideals go the
length of owning untraceable guns that can be sold to a random person with no
oversight.

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seivan
No, you look crazy because all those Michael Moore shit peddled and force fed
to us when we were young in school.

I found yesterday that full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US
but that's the first shit any idiot brings up here when they want to paint
Americans as "crazy".

Don't get more wrong, as things progress in Europe, we're eventually going to
need those "crazy" American weapons.

~~~
refurb
_full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US_

That's incorrect, they are legal federally, but some states have made them
illegal.

In order to purchase an automatic weapon, you need to submit a form to the
FBI, provide fingerprints, have your local police chief sign-off (or create an
LLC) and pay a $200 tax.

It's a very thorough background check.

Not many people buy them since the cheapest weapons cost $10,000 and go up to
$50,000. This is due to the limited supply since civilians can only buy
automatic weapons that were built before 1986.

~~~
gravypod
You can also technically become, for the same price, a Class-3 FFL with a SOT.

It is about $500-$1000 USD per year. You need a secure place to hold your
arms, keep extremely well maintained records of anything you buy, and if you
stop paying your SOT any post-86 things you have manufactured must be
destroyed.

If think you might also have to file a form 1 for everything you manufacture
and that takes 1-5 months even stretching out to a year in some cases.

This also comes with a round of your prints being sent to the FBI, ATF, and
I'm assuming a bunch of other three letter acronyms that you don't ever want
to meet.

But, if you can do that, get a drill press, and make friends at your local PD
you can make some good money on the side by building post-86 dealer samples
and handling transfers for your local PD.

Believe it or not, but by my current understanding factories cannot ship guns
directly to police offices, they must still be handled through an FFL.

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steve19
The "advertisement" of guns is a red herring.

Facebook already suppresses anything firearm related. They suppress the
visibility of gun-related pages (such as how many followers of a hunting page
see what was shared on it in their newsfeed) and at the same time bans the
paid promotion of posts.

You might not care, or in fact be pleased by this knowledge, but as com2kid
pointed out above, what else are they suppressing we don't already know about?

~~~
chrismartin
Yes - Facebook is a cathedral, not a bazaar. The contents of your news feed
can be easily (automatically) manipulated to fit any agenda that Facebook
wants you to receive [0].

Regardless of your gun politics, one web site operated by a self-interested
third party is never completely trustworthy as a public forum. I wish more
non-tech people would understand this.

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-
tinker...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-
users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html)

~~~
gravypod
The problem is that there is little push from the people for companies to be
open about this sort of thing.

People just expect that since they don't see it happen, that it does not.

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chrismartin
Even if there were such a push, and even if these companies claimed to be open
and impartial, we could never be certain. It's incompatible with the
imperative of a publicly owned corporation (to maximize shareholder value),
and more broadly, with any institution's first goal (to preserve itself).

Imagine that someone wanted to share information which was detrimental to a
social media corporation, and he/she published it on that same corporation's
social media platform. (This could be an investigative report exposing some
unsavory practice, or merely promotion of a competitor's product.) Completely
suppressing the story would be counterproductive for the corporation
(Streisand Effect), but they would certainly pull various levers to limit the
story's exposure on their site, insofar as they expected such intervention to
go unnoticed.

This problem is solved by things like federated social networking, where
everyone's updates are published by independently controlled sites. You (as a
content consumer) would subscribe directly to these sources, and you'd
directly control the algorithms that determine which stories float to the top
of your news feed, or some user-friendlier version of same.

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aggieben
I'm curious how they're actually going to do this. I mean, they can shut down
buyer/seller pages dedicated to guns, but those same groups can just set up
generic group pages and carry on pretty much as before, except price and
location won't be as prominently displayed. At worst, the moderators of those
groups will simply be more inconvenienced.

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intopieces
Details are vague about method of discovery and the exact protocols for
enforcement. These considerations aside, this policy is a good reminder that
even private Facebook communication is as good as public where the U.S.
Government is concerned.

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petke
Considering facebok is a global site and selling/buying/marketing of firearms
is highly regulated in most countries. It makes practical sense for facebook
to be conservative and just pick the strictest rule and apply it to all
content instead of having to enforce different rules for content created or
viewed in different countries.

Otherwise if they got it wrong and broke some local firearms laws they might
end up sued.

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aggieben
Has anyone noticed this in practice? All the news reports are explaining this
as a past-tense thing; as in, gun-related posts are already banned. I have
noticed zero effect so far. The gun groups I'm in are still chugging along as
normal.

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refurb
Does anyone know how important Facebook is when it comes to gun sales? It
seems odd the gov't would come after Facebook when there are many, many other
sites that offer the same opportunity to match up the buyer and seller of
guns.

~~~
gravypod
Most people I know have acquired one or two things from Facebook. You get some
great deals every now and again.

Instagram is another big services that hosts an extremely large gun culture.

~~~
refurb
Interesting. I knew it happened, I just didn't know it was that prevalent.

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ibejoeb
I wonder if this is going to be implemented on private messages or just on
public posts.

