Once in Illinois, Smirnov stuck a GPS tracker on Vesel’s car and followed her for a few days before finally ambushing her as she came out of the Czechoslovak Heritage Museum, where she’d been volunteering. He’d been harassing her from afar ever since she broke up with him. Smirnov then traveled to Illinois, and tracked down Jetka Vesel, 36, whom he’d had a brief relationship with after meeting her through an online gaming site a few years earlier. Ladera charged Smirnov an extra $200 because he couldn’t prove he lived in the state. 40-caliber handgun outside a Washington casino. (Canada’s gun laws are even stricter.) But through Armslist, he connected with Benedict Ladera, a 31-year-old Seattle man who sold him a. As a foreigner, Sminrov, then 21, could not legally purchase a gun anywhere in the United States. Smirnov was a Russian immigrant living in British Columbia. But that spring, Dmitry Smirnov brought the site its first widespread notice. Until April 2011, Armslist had operated largely under the radar, attracting attention only from gun enthusiasts. Today the internet provides a mechanism to facilitate countless private sales without a background check, no questions asked.”
That figure is probably low, because it dates from before the advent of the thriving internet market. Jon Lowy, director of the legal action project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, says, “The last figure we have is 40 percent of gun sales take place without a background check. But gun control advocates suspect the market is large. The real numbers aren’t known because the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives does not track how many guns are sold online or how many of them are used in crimes. The report suggested that the internet sales were likely tied to a fair amount of crime. When New York City took a look at the online gun marketplace in 2011, it found more than 25,000 weapons for sale on just 10 websites, making the internet a significant component of gun industry. These sorts of online operations are a primary target of proposals from President Obama that would require background checks for every gun sale, even private ones. Investigators discovered that 54 percent of the sellers they contacted through the site were openly willing to sell firearms to people who admitted they couldn’t pass a background check (which is a felony, incidentally).Īrmslist isn’t the only online gun site in the country, but it’s by far the biggest, especially after KSL.com, a news site owned by the Mormon church, stopped taking gun ads after the Newtown shooting. An undercover New York City investigation (PDF) found that the site likely was a major conduit for illegal gun sales. The site also had another, more dubious distinction: Weapons obtained through the site have been tied to the murders of four people and one suicide. By 2011, it was one of the largest online gun sites in the country, with more than 13,000 active listings for firearms. Such transactions are more anonymous than purchasing a weapon at a gun show, where people who can’t pass a background check can buy large quantities of guns.Īrmslist quickly took off. Buyers can contact sellers via phone or email to set up the sale, and avoid going through a federal background check or even leaving a paper trail.
The site allows private sellers to offer guns for sale to other private purchasers. So Gibbon hooked up with his academy buddy Brian Mancini, and two years later the pair launched a website they thought was destined to fill a natural void in the online marketplace: Armslist, a website devoted specifically to the private sales of guns and related gear. “When I heard them say that they decided to ban all gun-related ads because a few users cried out for it, it inspired me to create a place for law-abiding gun owners to buy and sell online without all of the hassles of auctions and shipping,” he told Human Events in 2010. The online classifieds site had decided to reject ads for firearms, and Gibbon thought he had spotted an opportunity. In 2007, US Air Force Academy graduate Jon Gibbon saw a television interview about Craigslist that got him thinking.
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