4 ms·

I used to work at a shop that sold firearms (among many other things) online. I didn't see all the laws we had to follow but quite a few I noticed (I worked on

by hfsktr 14y ago

I used to work at a shop that sold firearms (among many other things) online. I didn't see all the laws we had to follow but quite a few I noticed (I worked on the intranet site). Unless the customer was coming to pick up the weapon themselves (at our location) we would only ship guns to FFL's[1]. The FFL was also the one who did the background check as far as I'm aware. I don't know what percentage of our sales were local pickups but I am guessing we did the background for those (we had an FFL). They shut down but the company made it up to 70 or so employees. I don't know how we kept up on the laws. Our suppliers might have done that as we were sort of a middleman from the suppliers to the customers. I do remember that we needed to track a lot of things for the ATF and they had to be very accurate. The ATF would come in once a year or so and audit the logs and other things related to shipping. I never saw them but I remember the boss(es) being stressed during those weeks. 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Firearms_License http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Firearms_License

rdl 14y ago
Yeah, compliance is tricky. You can ship (e.g. a repair, or mailing a firearm to yourself if you don't take luggage on a flight), but it's a huge amount of complexity. Initial sale must be in-person or ship to an FFL or a few exemptions (C&R, CMP, pre-1898, 80%), and of course all the non-firearms parts which Amazon usually does sell. Ammunition is more tightly regulated than e.g. barrels. Once you add in state laws (e.g. Californians can't buy rifles in Nevada in person, although Nevadans and most other state residents can), and the penalties for non-compliance, and I don't think it's reasonable to require Amazon deal with firearms. Through Marketplace it might be a little bit more vague. But a pure advertising site should be comfortable running firearms ads. If the owner is personally opposed to firearms, no one is forcing him to carry those ads, but I'm a (very small) part owner of Google, so for a public company, it's probably not a great position to take.

by hfsktr 14y ago

rdl 14y ago

Yeah, compliance is tricky. You can ship (e.g. a repair, or mailing a firearm to yourself if you don't take luggage on a flight), but it's a huge amount of complexity. Initial sale must be in-person or ship to an FFL or a few exemptions (C&R, CMP, pre-1898, 80%), and of course all the non-firearms parts which Amazon usually does sell. Ammunition is more tightly regulated than e.g. barrels. Once you add in state laws (e.g. Californians can't buy rifles in Nevada in person, although Nevadans and most other state residents can), and the penalties for non-compliance, and I don't think it's reasonable to require Amazon deal with firearms. Through Marketplace it might be a little bit more vague. But a pure advertising site should be comfortable running firearms ads. If the owner is personally opposed to firearms, no one is forcing him to carry those ads, but I'm a (very small) part owner of Google, so for a public company, it's probably not a great position to take.