Facebook's come under a lot of heat for refusing to moderate the buying and selling of firearms in Groups, often in violation of local laws[1]. Hopefully their moderation standards will be higher on Marketplace.
That is a terrible article with lots of emotional writing and nothing cited to support their claims. Selling firearms locally that does not cross state borders or to prohibited individuals is generally legal.
Yup, so long as you are following the local/state laws there is nothing wrong with using Facebook (IMO) to facilitate the meet up. No different than placing an ad in the newspaper to sell a gun and meeting the buyer somewhere.
This is exactly the opposite of my experience. FB has been extremely successful in shutting down any and all local firearms sales groups. It was the impetus behind my own decision to boycott Facebook permanently.
They shut down the NZ Hunting Facebook group, which had over 10,000 members because people were selling firearms on it (which is not in violation of New Zealand law).
What a waste of time. The activity will just move elsewhere.
Working towards requiring registration/background checks of private sales would actually accomplish what they want. Lobbying Facebook to disassociate themselves from the sales will accomplish little more than moving the sales off of Facebook.
And of course, given that there are tens of millions of unregistered firearms in the US, all a registration law would do is inconvenience people willing to comply with it, it wouldn't stop people looking to get a gun without registering it.
If you want universal background checks then let private sellers use the same system gun shops do. Paying $25-$50 per gun at a gun shop to do a transfer is cost prohibitive.
There is no reason a buyer shouldn't be able to go to the ATF website submit themselves for a BC and get an approval code for a seller to verify. That respects privacy and gets you closer to 100% background checks. No responsible gun owner wants to sell to a felon. Thats why a lot will only do private transactions with CCW permit holders.
Thank you for saying this. I wrote something similar to my state reps when the law for private sales passed here. It is onerous on those of us live rural where guns are needed but are considerably far from a licensed dealer.