Facebook And Instagram Crack Down On Private Gun Sales

Facebook’s ban on unlicensed peer-to-peer gun sales also applies to Instagram.

“For the past two years, more and more people use Facebook to find products and to buy and sell things to each other”, explained Monika Bickert, head of product policies of Facebook, in an email to AFP.

“We are continuing to develop, test, and launch new products to make this experience even better for people and are updating our regulated goods policies to reflect this evolution”, she added, according to the New York Daily News. On July 13, 2015, Facebook became the fastest company in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index to reach a market cap of Dollars 250 billion.

Facebook was never directly involved in gun sales.

Previously private firearms sellers had been prohibited from advertising “no background check required”, or offering transactions across USA state lines without a licensed dealer because Facebook said such posts indicated a willingness to evade the law. Everytown has collected examples of murders carried out by people who would have failed a background check, but obtained a gun through a person-to-person sale arranged online – including two cases known to involve Facebook.

New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman praised the move to crack down on illegal gun sales. The social network has 219 million users in the USA alone, and though its not clear exactly how many private gun sales were happening on the site, the Times calls it one of the world’s largest marketplaces for private gun sales, and, from a cursory search, the site has many large groups devoted to firearm sales that act like online classified pages. Earlier this year President Obama introduced an executive order to expand background checks for those wishing to purchase guns, and although Congress is still in gridlock when it comes to the issue, it looks like Facebook at least is following the president’s lead.

Several groups, including Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, celebrated the ban as “an important step to keep guns out of unsafe hands”.

The National Rifle Association has yet to respond to the Facebook decision, multiple media outlets reported.