Today is so yesterday. While the show remains a cash cow, Today’s production team can’t show up at J-school lecture halls without the cloying smell of 80′s happy talk overpowering their intellectual pretensions. And so Today is dipping its collective toe into . . . wait for it . . . investigative journalism. What better way to kick off their new venture than a cookie-cutter piece of EAT-G (Easy Access to Guns)? Did you know you can buy guns over the Internet without an FFL and FBI background check? Only one problem . . .
YOU CAN’T. But that kind of fact checking seems to be beyond the ken of Jeff Rossen and NBC’s “national investigative unit.”
Hey guys, the Internet is only the means by which buyers and sellers find each other. It’s the modern-day equivalent of what used to be called “newspapers.” You know; a printed publication that ran “classified ads.” I hear they used to be all the rage.
Apparently, this newfangled Internet’s something different: a cesspit of illegal gun sales. Not just guns. Semi-automatic guns. Assault rifles. Fifty caliber sniper rifles that can shoot five miles. Five miles! And bring down a helicopter! As Rossen breathlessly pointed out, the fiddy’s a favorite of Mexican drug lords.
OK, but—you can’t buy a gun off the Internet from a distributor or manufacturer without said firearm going through a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL). Private sales between individuals are perfectly legal—as long as the buyer and seller are both residents of the same state (where the deal goes down). That’s true no matter how the buyer and seller find each other.
Equally, selling a firearm to a felon is perfectly illegal, no matter how that deal goes down. So how does Joe Blow know the difference between friend and felon? He doesn’t. Not really. (Clever criminals!) The seller can be held accountable for selling a firearm to a felon, but the government has to prove the private seller’s foreknowledge in a court of law.
OMG! How do you live with that? If you’re a liberal, you don’t. Actually, you do. Because you have to. Because America’s founding fathers didn’t want the government poking its nose into private transactions between citizens until and unless they can prove that said transaction is illegal—after the fact.
Innocent until proven guilty. That kind of thing.
Does this Internet gun sales “loophole” enable gun-seeking bad guys? Maybe. But forcing private sellers to involve the feds in a supposedly free market also enables criminals. Ones that operate within the law (hint: they are the law). Go figure. And while you’re at it, don’t forget to change the channel. [h/t to TTAG's AI for the link]
Interesting piece of sensationalism. The story lost any credibility with this statement: ‘This man is about to sell us a tactical assault rifle, modified to use bullets for an AK-47.’ The man was selling an SKS, which happens to use the same 7.62x39mm cartridge as an AK-47. It certainly wasn’t modified to do so. The only modification the rifle seemed to have was the black plastic Tapco stock.
Could they have used the words ‘tactical’ and ‘assault rifle’ any more in their report? What a piece of garbage. It reminds me of the Glock plastic pistol paranoia of the ’80s.
What not one of those deadly M16s that the US military uses modified to take AK ammo?
Or one of those deadly Mini-14s, like the criminals used in that deadly 1980′s FBI shootout modified to use AK-47 ammo?
the military isn’t going to modify any military rifle to use 7.62x39mm ammo. It is heavier, more expensive, and larger (less rounds per clip). Also just to point out…..the 7.62 x 39 ammo outdates the .223 (5.56 nato) round. If they wanted to build thier rifles to accept the 7.62 x 39 they would have built it that way to begin with.
Not that this is apropos to the article at all, but there have been attempts to do this over the years, but the aggressive taper of 7.62×39 doesn’t work at all well the AR/M16/M4 platform.
The 300BLK (7.62×35), however, is basically a version of the AK round built to work in that platform, and has superior ballistics to the 7.62×39. Who knows whether it’ll be widely adopted in the military, but if that’s what you’re looking for, 300BLK is what you want.
ZOMG YOU SAID CLIP!!! GUN NUT CONNIPTION!!!
This is yet another display of the typical and deliberate ignorance of facts by over-educated, under-intelligent liberal arts majors who form the media. They have very little real-world experience in, well, anything.
But boy oh boy, can they prattle on endlessly about it.
Hmm. Well, criticizing the reporters for dropping buzz-words is kind of silly. You and I know full well that an SKS uses the same ammo as an AK without modification but that is sort of beside the point.
The time when they told the seller that they couldnt pass the background check…that person should have ended the sale then and there.
As I see it, if the Gov’mt wanted to decrease this kind of thing they should make the number for the FBI background check a Hotline and make it available to the public. Print that number on the side of all firearms packages…heck, put a sticker on all accessory packages too.
Got a question about a person you are selling to? Ask for ID and call the FBI. If that person sticks around at all, you can bet they are on the Up and up.
Combine that with a public awareness campaign so that people know that they can and should call if they have a question about a buyer.
Honest folks would call and dishonest folks would not.
The Brady Bunch et al wants to stop private sales, this is propoganda for that end.
Note, they did not show the sales where someone walked away from the sale.
As far as the FBI check, some states already make it a PITA for firearm sales. Case in point, CT
“A DPS-67-C and a DPS-3-C (4 copies) must be completed. The seller of the handgun must contact the Special Licensing and Firearms Unit at (860) 685-8400, or 1-(888) 335-8438 and obtain an authorization number for that sale. This number is to be added to both forms. The DPS-67-C is to be retained by the seller for 20 years. The seller should retain the original copy of the DPS-3 for their records, give one copy to the purchaser as a receipt, submit one copy to the local police authority where the purchaser resides and submit a final copy to the Commissioner of Public Safety. “
Guess I’ll just cross Connecticut off my list of places I’m willing to live…
Might aswell cross of California too….We are not any better here.
Kalifornia was the first one to go, actually. Followed quickly by NY, IL, MA, NJ, MD… Funny thing, though; Wisconsin recently clawed its way back onto the list.
The three and a half years I lived in California were the worst of my life. And I wasn’t even into guns then. No amount of money could convince me to live there again.
My wife and I were browsing in a bookstore last week. We sent my 9 YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER to the counter to purchase a product commonly used to mask the scent of an ILLEGAL COLOMBIAN IMPORT. The worker did not even ask my daughter for ID. She just sold it to her.
I like mine with cream and sugar.
Guns on the internets? Oh Noes!
Hey, NBC, welcome to 1999. Say, have you heard about that “Y2K” thing?
Oooh…Yellow Journalism at its finest.
You’re better than that Today show.
Nothing but a blatant hit piece. What they FAIL to acknowledge time and time again is that the vast majority of private transactions are done legally and responsibly, and that if a criminal wants a weapon, he’s going to get one.
NBC has formally announced to the world that it has NO INTENTION of reporting the truth.
but this is how criminals get their weapons: through private sales
I buy/sell/trade guns privately here in Oregon. A lot of us do from one end of the state to the other. It’s pretty much a standardized procedure that when the transfer is made the participants exchange CHL info, or driver’s license info, and in many cases a bill of sale is written up so the seller has proof that he sold the gun on a certain date. It’s been going on for years and the crime rate continues to decline. We’ve just got to do something about that.
I have looking to buy a gun on the internet, and have yet (after about 4 months) even seen any offer to sell without a FFL Dealer. I understand that private dealers can sell without an FFL, but even that is limited. It sounds like a typical Liberal “Guns are bad” newspiece. Unfortunatly i think most people know very little about facts, and listen to thier newsource far too often.
MA has a four sales a year rule for private parties. Disposing of more than four guns a year in private sales makes you a dealer, although there’s no limit on the number of private purchases. Every in-state transaction must be reported by the seller within seven days on a Form FA-10. For guns purchased from out of state, it’s the buyer’s responsibility to report the purchase on the FA-10.
The information is scanned into the Firearms Record Bureau database so that the guns can be
confiscated by the gun-grabbing bastardstraced if they’re stolen or used in a crime.Is this why they refer to people from MA as “Mass-holes”?
It’s only part of the reason. Spend a little time in Boston and you’ll know the rest of the story.
“Fifty caliber sniper rifles that can shoot five miles. Five miles! And bring down a helicopter!” we’re going to need them if obama gets re-elected, first to eliminate the pinheads of the likes of the today show and then to shoot down the drones coming after us…
This was hysterically funny. “Shopping mall parking lot!” “Seven-year-old son!”
And whoever said Today is “better than that,” well, no. This piece makes that abundantly clear.
A friend of mine bought a glock from a guy off the street in Chicago while he lived there for protection. He payed less than a legal glock costs me in California. If they’re trying to drive up illegal fire arms sale prices though limited local sales they’re failing baddly.
So, who watches television nowadays?
This article was on MSNBC website as well.
“Hey guys, the Internet is only the means by which buyers and sellers find each other. It’s the modern-day equivalent of what used to be called “newspapers.” You know; a printed publication that ran “classified ads.” I hear they used to be all the rage.”
You just gave them tomorrow’s story: “Holy crap! You can buy guns through newspapers without background checks!”
The Today show is to multimedia as Readers Digest is to literature, or Old Country Buffet to fine dining. Hard to imagine people still spent irretrievable moments of their life on such drivel.
Are you kidding?
People spend irretrievable hours of their lives on staged pretend “reality” shows and celebrity gossip.
Why would they not spend moments on the “news”.
They only scare old women and small children with this crap so why sweat it. Until and if the SCOTUS rules differently its still “open for business” in the gun world. Besides, this give all us folks more water cooler topics to discuss with local Morons at starbucks.
Indiana is pretty good on FTF transactions and actually has liberalized gun laws in the State. It seems for the most part we are doing OK. I think most people try to keep things legit. You will always have some bad apples.
What a bunch of goobers. I wonder if any of these ‘investigative reporters’ actually know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of.
If there were any question about whether these people are anti-gun or just anti-private sales (which, of course, there isn’t anyway), it went away when they reported that they had these thousands of dollars worth of guns destroyed, rather than recoup some of their cost by selling them to a “legitimate” dealer. (“Legitimate” is in scare quotes, because they no doubt believe that no gun dealer is legitimate.)