5 ms·

Facebook Moves to Ban Private Gun Sales on Its Site

31 points by aaronbrethorst 11y ago

com2kid 11y ago
Another possible headline: Facebook complies with request by US Government to ban certain types of perfectly legal speech Doesn't sound quite so nice.
- krapp 11y ago
  I am not a lawyer but I don't believe selling guns without background checks is entirely legal in the US, so fearmongering aside, the government might have a point, however tenuous it might be.
  - dexwiz 11y ago
    If you are an arms dealer of some sort you have to do checks. You do not if you are doing personal sales.
    - krapp 11y ago
      fair enough.
    - Pxtl 11y ago
      And this is why Americans look crazy to much of the rest of the world. I understand owning guns. I don't understand taking libertarian ideals go the length of owning untraceable guns that can be sold to a random person with no oversight.
      - icebraining 11y ago
        I don't think it's hard to understand. The lore is that guns are an essential component in the protection against governmental overreach, therefore allowing strict governmental oversight over individual gun ownership would defeat the purpose. I happen to disagree that owning an handgun (or even a semi-automatic rifle) will actually be very influential in the event of a dictatorial takeover, but I can understand the logic.
        brandonmenc 11y ago
        > I happen to disagree that owning an handgun (or even a semi-automatic rifle) will actually be very influential in the event of a dictatorial takeover It can't hurt.
        icebraining 11y ago
        Sure it can, if part of the population actually supports the dictatorship, it becomes even more dangerous for the persecuted minority. We've seen examples of this many times.
        MCRed 11y ago
        During WWII we produced guns en masse called "the liberator" which were air dropped behind Nazi lines. The Nazis ran out of ammo and so many of the jews in the concentration camps were guarded by empty rifles. If they had had basic firearms knowledge they would have known this, as the Nazis weren't even putting the magazines in the rifles. They could have over thrown their captors relatively easily, even being unarmed, because they outnumbered them many to one, and their captors were unarmed. So not even having guns there, a gun culture would have likely saved lives. (this is based on an account of an elderly man who was in the concentration camps and later came to learn about guns as part of his vow of "never again". There is an organization based on this principle called "Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership.")
      - kec 11y ago
        The problem is there doesn't seem to be a way for the left and right to compromise on this issue. You can't realistically police private party transfers without mandatory registration, and there are too many instances of registration later leading to confiscation for that to be palatable to 2nd Amendment rights advocates. On the other side, there have been several attempts to open up access to the national background check system to private sellers, but every time it gets blocked by the left, as voluntary background checks are largely seen as an ineffective half measure.
      - seivan 11y ago
        No, you look crazy because all those Michael Moore shit peddled and force fed to us when we were young in school. I found yesterday that full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US but that's the first shit any idiot brings up here when they want to paint Americans as "crazy". Don't get more wrong, as things progress in Europe, we're eventually going to need those "crazy" American weapons.
        alistairSH 11y ago
        Except, fully automatic guns are legal. You need a special license to own them, and they get registered, but they are legal. They just aren't as easy to buy and own as semi-automatic weapons.
        Wingman4l7 11y ago
        Technically, you can get a fully automatic rifle in the US -- but it's very expensive and requires a special permit. It would have had to have been in circulation prior to the 1986 ban; there is a very limited pool of them in collector's hands and they go for 5 figures.
        refurb 11y ago
        full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US That's incorrect, they are legal federally, but some states have made them illegal. In order to purchase an automatic weapon, you need to submit a form to the FBI, provide fingerprints, have your local police chief sign-off (or create an LLC) and pay a $200 tax. It's a very thorough background check. Not many people buy them since the cheapest weapons cost $10,000 and go up to $50,000. This is due to the limited supply since civilians can only buy automatic weapons that were built before 1986.
        gravypod 11y ago
        You can also technically become, for the same price, a Class-3 FFL with a SOT. It is about $500-$1000 USD per year. You need a secure place to hold your arms, keep extremely well maintained records of anything you buy, and if you stop paying your SOT any post-86 things you have manufactured must be destroyed. If think you might also have to file a form 1 for everything you manufacture and that takes 1-5 months even stretching out to a year in some cases. This also comes with a round of your prints being sent to the FBI, ATF, and I'm assuming a bunch of other three letter acronyms that you don't ever want to meet. But, if you can do that, get a drill press, and make friends at your local PD you can make some good money on the side by building post-86 dealer samples and handling transfers for your local PD. Believe it or not, but by my current understanding factories cannot ship guns directly to police offices, they must still be handled through an FFL.
      - alistairSH 11y ago
        I don't understand the down votes you are receiving... your comment is one I have heard from relatives and friends from Europe. As noted in the other response, the historical reason is that private gun-ownership (usually in relation to a local militia of some sort) is the only protection against a tyrannical government. In the era of the Revolutionary War, that was certainly true. I don't happen to believe that is true any more, and that the 2nd amendment is an anachronism. But, I'm in a minority (where the majority in the US seems to prefer limited gun ownership - more so than what we have now, but not complete bans and confiscations, as Australia saw recently).
  - icebraining 11y ago
    In many states, it's perfectly legal if it's a private sale, ie., the seller isn't a licensed dealer. It's often dubbed the "gun show loophole", despite not being limited to sales at gun shows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole
    - DrScump 11y ago
      It's called the "gun show loophole" even though it has nothing to do with gun shows at all. If a licensed dealer sells at a gun show, s/he still has to perform the same background checks as if it was in-store.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- qmalzp 11y ago
  Porn is also perfectly legal and you won't find that on Facebook
- notatoad 11y ago
  the redefinition of everything to be speech under american law so that it can fall under "free speech" protections is ridiculous. selling is not speaking.
  - refurb 11y ago
    That's not what the courts have said. "Advertising is indeed protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."[1] [1]http://www.lawpublish.com/amend1.html http://www.lawpublish.com/amend1.html
    - notatoad 11y ago
      Yes, I know that's not what the courts said. That was exactly my point - US law is redefining everything as speech, regardless of how a rational person who understands the meaning of words might think.
- st3v3r 11y ago
  No, that's not a possible headline.
  - gravypod 11y ago
    Why? Do you have any way of characterizing this claim as being false?
koenigdavidmj 11y ago
The only kind of private sale that is legal is actually physically meeting with the person and giving it to them. If you're mailing it, you have to give it to a gun shop near you, who mail it to a gun shop near the recipient, and they do a background check of the person before the last hop.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- aggieben 11y ago
  That's pretty much how FB sales go. A: "I have this gun I"ll sell for $400." B: "I will buy it from you." A: "Ok. Let's meet at the police station parking lot. What time is good for you?" B: "How about 5:30?" A: "Ok, see you there."
  - gravypod 11y ago
    Yes, but these sales should be otherwise legal with records of the transaction now kept by Facebook. Most states require you to show firearms purchaser IDs, called FID in my home state as well as a drivers license. To acquire a FID, you need to go through a background check. This is how you are meant to know if the person is "safe to sell to". If people in state X have a problem with that, then they should get together and find a solution to it. Until then I don't think I can justify to myself censoring an otherwise completely legal discussion, especially when such a discussion can be used as a record of a sale that would otherwise not be present. That's just my two cents.
    - refurb 11y ago
      Most states require you to show firearms purchaser IDs Minor point, but there aren't that many states that have firearm purchaser IDs. NY, NJ, MA, IL are a few, but most states don't require anything more than a driver's license.
      - gravypod 11y ago
dhfuehxhf 11y ago
Am I the only liberal out there that thinks it's hypocritical to push gun control measures because we have modern police forces, but in the same breath protest police brutality and the encroachment of the police state? Hell, even Marx advocated widespread gun ownership as an implicit reminder for those in power that they had to be accountable for their actions.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- bcook 11y ago
  Those in power have attack helicopters. My Glock is useless against that. Edit: This post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I had no idea it was such a hot-button issue.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Tell that to the poorly armed fighters in Afghanistan who kicked out the Soviets and the North Vietnamese who kicked out the Americans. Sure, going toe-to-toe with an attack helicopter with only a handgun is a losing proposition, but that's not the only way to do it.
    - BookmarkSaver 11y ago
      They didn't do it with gumption, they did it by getting armed by other foreign powers on the other side of the proxy conflict. Without massive support from global or regional powers, the guerrillas wouldn't really have had a chance.
      - refurb 11y ago
        Yes North Vietnam received military assistance from China and the Soviet Union later on in the war, but the NLF had access to very little of that weaponry. There are stories from American soldiers where they were confiscating WW2 bolt-action firearms from the NLF right up until the late 1960s. Algeria is another great example where they kicked the French out of Algeria but had very little backing from a major superpower. The point is that simple firearms can inflict a lot of damage on a highly sophisticated army.
steve19 11y ago
The "advertisement" of guns is a red herring. Facebook already suppresses anything firearm related. They suppress the visibility of gun-related pages (such as how many followers of a hunting page see what was shared on it in their newsfeed) and at the same time bans the paid promotion of posts. You might not care, or in fact be pleased by this knowledge, but as com2kid pointed out above, what else are they suppressing we don't already know about?
- chrismartin 11y ago
  Yes - Facebook is a cathedral, not a bazaar. The contents of your news feed can be easily (automatically) manipulated to fit any agenda that Facebook wants you to receive [0]. Regardless of your gun politics, one web site operated by a self-interested third party is never completely trustworthy as a public forum. I wish more non-tech people would understand this. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinker...
  - gravypod 11y ago
    The problem is that there is little push from the people for companies to be open about this sort of thing. People just expect that since they don't see it happen, that it does not.
    - chrismartin 11y ago
      Even if there were such a push, and even if these companies claimed to be open and impartial, we could never be certain. It's incompatible with the imperative of a publicly owned corporation (to maximize shareholder value), and more broadly, with any institution's first goal (to preserve itself). Imagine that someone wanted to share information which was detrimental to a social media corporation, and he/she published it on that same corporation's social media platform. (This could be an investigative report exposing some unsavory practice, or merely promotion of a competitor's product.) Completely suppressing the story would be counterproductive for the corporation (Streisand Effect), but they would certainly pull various levers to limit the story's exposure on their site, insofar as they expected such intervention to go unnoticed. This problem is solved by things like federated social networking, where everyone's updates are published by independently controlled sites. You (as a content consumer) would subscribe directly to these sources, and you'd directly control the algorithms that determine which stories float to the top of your news feed, or some user-friendlier version of same.
intopieces 11y ago
Details are vague about method of discovery and the exact protocols for enforcement. These considerations aside, this policy is a good reminder that even private Facebook communication is as good as public where the U.S. Government is concerned.
ibejoeb 11y ago
I wonder if this is going to be implemented on private messages or just on public posts.
refurb 11y ago
Does anyone know how important Facebook is when it comes to gun sales? It seems odd the gov't would come after Facebook when there are many, many other sites that offer the same opportunity to match up the buyer and seller of guns.
- gravypod 11y ago
  Most people I know have acquired one or two things from Facebook. You get some great deals every now and again. Instagram is another big services that hosts an extremely large gun culture.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Interesting. I knew it happened, I just didn't know it was that prevalent.
- aggieben 11y ago
  I think it's just the latest convenience. I doubt very much that FB's move will make any difference whatsoever (not that I'm not bummed, because I find it convenient to follow gun trader groups in one place).
petke 11y ago
Considering facebok is a global site and selling/buying/marketing of firearms is highly regulated in most countries. It makes practical sense for facebook to be conservative and just pick the strictest rule and apply it to all content instead of having to enforce different rules for content created or viewed in different countries. Otherwise if they got it wrong and broke some local firearms laws they might end up sued.
aggieben 11y ago
I'm curious how they're actually going to do this. I mean, they can shut down buyer/seller pages dedicated to guns, but those same groups can just set up generic group pages and carry on pretty much as before, except price and location won't be as prominently displayed. At worst, the moderators of those groups will simply be more inconvenienced.
aggieben 11y ago
Has anyone noticed this in practice? All the news reports are explaining this as a past-tense thing; as in, gun-related posts are already banned. I have noticed zero effect so far. The gun groups I'm in are still chugging along as normal.

Another possible headline: Facebook complies with request by US Government to ban certain types of perfectly legal speech Doesn't sound quite so nice.

krapp 11y ago
I am not a lawyer but I don't believe selling guns without background checks is entirely legal in the US, so fearmongering aside, the government might have a point, however tenuous it might be.
- dexwiz 11y ago
  If you are an arms dealer of some sort you have to do checks. You do not if you are doing personal sales.
  - krapp 11y ago
    fair enough.
  - Pxtl 11y ago
    And this is why Americans look crazy to much of the rest of the world. I understand owning guns. I don't understand taking libertarian ideals go the length of owning untraceable guns that can be sold to a random person with no oversight.
    - icebraining 11y ago
      I don't think it's hard to understand. The lore is that guns are an essential component in the protection against governmental overreach, therefore allowing strict governmental oversight over individual gun ownership would defeat the purpose. I happen to disagree that owning an handgun (or even a semi-automatic rifle) will actually be very influential in the event of a dictatorial takeover, but I can understand the logic.
      - brandonmenc 11y ago
        > I happen to disagree that owning an handgun (or even a semi-automatic rifle) will actually be very influential in the event of a dictatorial takeover It can't hurt.
        icebraining 11y ago
        Sure it can, if part of the population actually supports the dictatorship, it becomes even more dangerous for the persecuted minority. We've seen examples of this many times.
      - MCRed 11y ago
        During WWII we produced guns en masse called "the liberator" which were air dropped behind Nazi lines. The Nazis ran out of ammo and so many of the jews in the concentration camps were guarded by empty rifles. If they had had basic firearms knowledge they would have known this, as the Nazis weren't even putting the magazines in the rifles. They could have over thrown their captors relatively easily, even being unarmed, because they outnumbered them many to one, and their captors were unarmed. So not even having guns there, a gun culture would have likely saved lives. (this is based on an account of an elderly man who was in the concentration camps and later came to learn about guns as part of his vow of "never again". There is an organization based on this principle called "Jews for the preservation of firearms ownership.")
    - kec 11y ago
      The problem is there doesn't seem to be a way for the left and right to compromise on this issue. You can't realistically police private party transfers without mandatory registration, and there are too many instances of registration later leading to confiscation for that to be palatable to 2nd Amendment rights advocates. On the other side, there have been several attempts to open up access to the national background check system to private sellers, but every time it gets blocked by the left, as voluntary background checks are largely seen as an ineffective half measure.
    - seivan 11y ago
      No, you look crazy because all those Michael Moore shit peddled and force fed to us when we were young in school. I found yesterday that full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US but that's the first shit any idiot brings up here when they want to paint Americans as "crazy". Don't get more wrong, as things progress in Europe, we're eventually going to need those "crazy" American weapons.
      - alistairSH 11y ago
        Except, fully automatic guns are legal. You need a special license to own them, and they get registered, but they are legal. They just aren't as easy to buy and own as semi-automatic weapons.
      - Wingman4l7 11y ago
        Technically, you can get a fully automatic rifle in the US -- but it's very expensive and requires a special permit. It would have had to have been in circulation prior to the 1986 ban; there is a very limited pool of them in collector's hands and they go for 5 figures.
      - refurb 11y ago
        full automatic assault rifles are not legal in the US That's incorrect, they are legal federally, but some states have made them illegal. In order to purchase an automatic weapon, you need to submit a form to the FBI, provide fingerprints, have your local police chief sign-off (or create an LLC) and pay a $200 tax. It's a very thorough background check. Not many people buy them since the cheapest weapons cost $10,000 and go up to $50,000. This is due to the limited supply since civilians can only buy automatic weapons that were built before 1986.
        gravypod 11y ago
        You can also technically become, for the same price, a Class-3 FFL with a SOT. It is about $500-$1000 USD per year. You need a secure place to hold your arms, keep extremely well maintained records of anything you buy, and if you stop paying your SOT any post-86 things you have manufactured must be destroyed. If think you might also have to file a form 1 for everything you manufacture and that takes 1-5 months even stretching out to a year in some cases. This also comes with a round of your prints being sent to the FBI, ATF, and I'm assuming a bunch of other three letter acronyms that you don't ever want to meet. But, if you can do that, get a drill press, and make friends at your local PD you can make some good money on the side by building post-86 dealer samples and handling transfers for your local PD. Believe it or not, but by my current understanding factories cannot ship guns directly to police offices, they must still be handled through an FFL.
    - alistairSH 11y ago
      I don't understand the down votes you are receiving... your comment is one I have heard from relatives and friends from Europe. As noted in the other response, the historical reason is that private gun-ownership (usually in relation to a local militia of some sort) is the only protection against a tyrannical government. In the era of the Revolutionary War, that was certainly true. I don't happen to believe that is true any more, and that the 2nd amendment is an anachronism. But, I'm in a minority (where the majority in the US seems to prefer limited gun ownership - more so than what we have now, but not complete bans and confiscations, as Australia saw recently).
- icebraining 11y ago
  In many states, it's perfectly legal if it's a private sale, ie., the seller isn't a licensed dealer. It's often dubbed the "gun show loophole", despite not being limited to sales at gun shows. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_show_loophole
  - DrScump 11y ago
    It's called the "gun show loophole" even though it has nothing to do with gun shows at all. If a licensed dealer sells at a gun show, s/he still has to perform the same background checks as if it was in-store.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
qmalzp 11y ago
Porn is also perfectly legal and you won't find that on Facebook
notatoad 11y ago
the redefinition of everything to be speech under american law so that it can fall under "free speech" protections is ridiculous. selling is not speaking.
- refurb 11y ago
  That's not what the courts have said. "Advertising is indeed protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution."[1] [1]http://www.lawpublish.com/amend1.html http://www.lawpublish.com/amend1.html
  - notatoad 11y ago
    Yes, I know that's not what the courts said. That was exactly my point - US law is redefining everything as speech, regardless of how a rational person who understands the meaning of words might think.
st3v3r 11y ago
No, that's not a possible headline.
- gravypod 11y ago
  Why? Do you have any way of characterizing this claim as being false?

koenigdavidmj 11y ago

The only kind of private sale that is legal is actually physically meeting with the person and giving it to them. If you're mailing it, you have to give it to a gun shop near you, who mail it to a gun shop near the recipient, and they do a background check of the person before the last hop.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
aggieben 11y ago
That's pretty much how FB sales go. A: "I have this gun I"ll sell for $400." B: "I will buy it from you." A: "Ok. Let's meet at the police station parking lot. What time is good for you?" B: "How about 5:30?" A: "Ok, see you there."
- gravypod 11y ago
  Yes, but these sales should be otherwise legal with records of the transaction now kept by Facebook. Most states require you to show firearms purchaser IDs, called FID in my home state as well as a drivers license. To acquire a FID, you need to go through a background check. This is how you are meant to know if the person is "safe to sell to". If people in state X have a problem with that, then they should get together and find a solution to it. Until then I don't think I can justify to myself censoring an otherwise completely legal discussion, especially when such a discussion can be used as a record of a sale that would otherwise not be present. That's just my two cents.
  - refurb 11y ago
    Most states require you to show firearms purchaser IDs Minor point, but there aren't that many states that have firearm purchaser IDs. NY, NJ, MA, IL are a few, but most states don't require anything more than a driver's license.
    - gravypod 11y ago

dhfuehxhf 11y ago

Am I the only liberal out there that thinks it's hypocritical to push gun control measures because we have modern police forces, but in the same breath protest police brutality and the encroachment of the police state? Hell, even Marx advocated widespread gun ownership as an implicit reminder for those in power that they had to be accountable for their actions.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bcook 11y ago
Those in power have attack helicopters. My Glock is useless against that. Edit: This post was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I had no idea it was such a hot-button issue.
- refurb 11y ago
  Tell that to the poorly armed fighters in Afghanistan who kicked out the Soviets and the North Vietnamese who kicked out the Americans. Sure, going toe-to-toe with an attack helicopter with only a handgun is a losing proposition, but that's not the only way to do it.
  - BookmarkSaver 11y ago
    They didn't do it with gumption, they did it by getting armed by other foreign powers on the other side of the proxy conflict. Without massive support from global or regional powers, the guerrillas wouldn't really have had a chance.
    - refurb 11y ago
      Yes North Vietnam received military assistance from China and the Soviet Union later on in the war, but the NLF had access to very little of that weaponry. There are stories from American soldiers where they were confiscating WW2 bolt-action firearms from the NLF right up until the late 1960s. Algeria is another great example where they kicked the French out of Algeria but had very little backing from a major superpower. The point is that simple firearms can inflict a lot of damage on a highly sophisticated army.

steve19 11y ago

The "advertisement" of guns is a red herring. Facebook already suppresses anything firearm related. They suppress the visibility of gun-related pages (such as how many followers of a hunting page see what was shared on it in their newsfeed) and at the same time bans the paid promotion of posts. You might not care, or in fact be pleased by this knowledge, but as com2kid pointed out above, what else are they suppressing we don't already know about?

chrismartin 11y ago
Yes - Facebook is a cathedral, not a bazaar. The contents of your news feed can be easily (automatically) manipulated to fit any agenda that Facebook wants you to receive [0]. Regardless of your gun politics, one web site operated by a self-interested third party is never completely trustworthy as a public forum. I wish more non-tech people would understand this. [0] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinkers-with-users-emotions-in-news-feed-experiment-stirring-outcry.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/30/technology/facebook-tinker...
- gravypod 11y ago
  The problem is that there is little push from the people for companies to be open about this sort of thing. People just expect that since they don't see it happen, that it does not.
  - chrismartin 11y ago
    Even if there were such a push, and even if these companies claimed to be open and impartial, we could never be certain. It's incompatible with the imperative of a publicly owned corporation (to maximize shareholder value), and more broadly, with any institution's first goal (to preserve itself). Imagine that someone wanted to share information which was detrimental to a social media corporation, and he/she published it on that same corporation's social media platform. (This could be an investigative report exposing some unsavory practice, or merely promotion of a competitor's product.) Completely suppressing the story would be counterproductive for the corporation (Streisand Effect), but they would certainly pull various levers to limit the story's exposure on their site, insofar as they expected such intervention to go unnoticed. This problem is solved by things like federated social networking, where everyone's updates are published by independently controlled sites. You (as a content consumer) would subscribe directly to these sources, and you'd directly control the algorithms that determine which stories float to the top of your news feed, or some user-friendlier version of same.

intopieces 11y ago

Details are vague about method of discovery and the exact protocols for enforcement. These considerations aside, this policy is a good reminder that even private Facebook communication is as good as public where the U.S. Government is concerned.

ibejoeb 11y ago

I wonder if this is going to be implemented on private messages or just on public posts.

refurb 11y ago

Does anyone know how important Facebook is when it comes to gun sales? It seems odd the gov't would come after Facebook when there are many, many other sites that offer the same opportunity to match up the buyer and seller of guns.

gravypod 11y ago
Most people I know have acquired one or two things from Facebook. You get some great deals every now and again. Instagram is another big services that hosts an extremely large gun culture.
- refurb 11y ago
  Interesting. I knew it happened, I just didn't know it was that prevalent.
aggieben 11y ago
I think it's just the latest convenience. I doubt very much that FB's move will make any difference whatsoever (not that I'm not bummed, because I find it convenient to follow gun trader groups in one place).

petke 11y ago

Considering facebok is a global site and selling/buying/marketing of firearms is highly regulated in most countries. It makes practical sense for facebook to be conservative and just pick the strictest rule and apply it to all content instead of having to enforce different rules for content created or viewed in different countries. Otherwise if they got it wrong and broke some local firearms laws they might end up sued.

aggieben 11y ago

I'm curious how they're actually going to do this. I mean, they can shut down buyer/seller pages dedicated to guns, but those same groups can just set up generic group pages and carry on pretty much as before, except price and location won't be as prominently displayed. At worst, the moderators of those groups will simply be more inconvenienced.

aggieben 11y ago

Has anyone noticed this in practice? All the news reports are explaining this as a past-tense thing; as in, gun-related posts are already banned. I have noticed zero effect so far. The gun groups I'm in are still chugging along as normal.