The Business of Guns

again—and there’s little the buying customer can do to get a refund after such a criminal transaction. Dysfunctional guns and counterfeit guns are also typical complaints from customers who buy from unlicensed vendors, since there is no type of warranty or further responsibility from the vendor once the money changes hands. Perhaps surprisingly, there are only a few examples of gun crime stemming from online sales, since the ATF does not specifically track data in this category. Mother Jones , a gun- crime watchdog, noted that weapons obtained through Armslist. com have been conclusively tied to just four murders and one suicide. This is not to say that the Internet does not facilitate gun violence, however. In one particularly gruesome case, David Ray Conley, a man previously charged with domestic abuse, and therefore not legally permitted to purchase a firearm, bought a 9mm handgun off the Internet in 2016 and then shot his former girlfriend, her boyfriend, and her six children. Armslist itself has faced two lawsuits against its practices (despite the website itself not directly selling firearms), first in 2012, after the murder of Jitka Vesel by her stalker, Demetry Smirnov, and then in 2019, after Zina Daniel Haughton was murdered by her husband. Despite the publicity of crimes that take place with an Internet-purchased firearm, they still account for much less gun crime than weapons purchased legally, through a straw purchaser, or at a gun show. BJS statistics report that fewer than 1 percent of inmates at federal and state prisons report having purchased the gun they used in a violent crime from an online vendor. Clearing Up Internet Sales: Free Speech versus Censorship It has long been a dream of many politicians to successfully police the Internet, restricting or eliminating access to everything

Chapter 4: The Internet

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