Guns on the internet

I note with some interest the resurrection of the “buying guns online” meme in the aftermath of the PA gym shooting.  Rich Grassi takes a look at it in the Tactical Wire, and hits all the salient points on the head.  One of the legacy media’s favorite stunts in perpetuating this myth is to pull what amounts to a “bait and switch” – they’ll say something along the lines of “OMFG BUYING GUNS ONLINE!!!!ELEVEN” and then very briefly say “you have to go to a dealer to pick it up” and then immediately transition to “OMFG ILLEGAL HI-CAP CLIPS!!!!” or some other distraction.  The point of all of this is exactly that – to distract the average viewer from the facts of buying guns online.

Say, for example, I wanted to buy this sexy Glock 24 (on sale!) to shoot in Limited-10 Division.  To do that, I’d have to go through the following steps:

  1. Order the gun from Davidson’s and pay the deposit
  2. Go to my local gun shop when they call me to say that they’ve received it
  3. Fill out the federal 4473 form.
  4. Have the gunshop run a NICS check on me (that’s a federal background check, the same one that you have to have run when you buy a gun the regular way, or at a gun show)
  5. After NICS comes back clear, I pay the shop for the balance of the gun, and then I’m on my merry way.

In short, you can’t have guns shipped straight to your house.  You cannot buy a modern firearm online without going through the background check process.  Most online auction sites like GunBroker require full compliance with the laws to be a bidder/seller, which means that guns purchased online go through the same NICS check as any other gun.

6 Comments

  1. Absolutely right. If anything, it’s harder for me (as the employee of a dealer) to sell a gun on Gunbroker than it is to sell it out of the store because of the paperwork trail we create to know exactly where it came from and where it went. I’m sure our system is more detailed than it really has to be, but we want to know the exact details of our transactions. More dealers than not track their inventory like this. Those that don’t, don’t stay in business very long.

  2. Every time one of these losers got a gun or parts or ammo on the internets this flares up.

    How come we never hear “OMFG! You can order PRESCRIPTION DRUGS on the INTERNET?”

  3. “2. Go to my local gun shop when they call me to say that they’ve received it ”

    What? That’s some “gun-nut” fail going on there. Real gun-nuts are good friends with someone with a FFL. That way, the NICS is run while we sit in the living room watching TV.

  4. Still not as good as having your feet propped up on an ottoman with a beer in hand while your background check is going through. Finally an aspect of gun-nuttery where I come out ahead of you. I didn’t think that was ever going to happen.

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