Tag Archives: guns

Facebook’s Ban on Gun Sales is Being Enforced by a Few Dedicated Users

Mother Jones

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“Friends, I need your help,” Greg Evers wrote to his Facebook followers last Wednesday. “Over the last 48 hours as I have taken on Washington and the liberal Obama/Clinton policies of Gun Control I have become the target of a well organized liberal machine.” He implored his supporters, “I need your help combating those who would tear our constitution to shreds.”

Evers, a Republican candidate for Congress from Florida, had just launched the “Homeland Defender Giveaway” on his Facebook campaign page, offering an AR-15 rifle to one randomly chosen resident of his district. The gun, similar to the assault rifle recently used to kill 49 people at a gay club in Orlando, Florida, “proudly displays the 2nd amendment sic on the right side of the receiver,” read a press release from the Evers campaign.

Evers didn’t get the response he was expecting. The “well organized liberal machine” he referred to is the disparate collection of individuals who have taken it upon themselves to flood Facebook with reports of suspected gun sales and get the site to take down posts promoting unlicensed firearms transactions. Several of them took issue with Evers’ AR-15 giveaway, seeing it as callous move in the wake of the Orlando massacre.

“I want it to be hard to get a gun. I’m opposed to how easy it is to take out 50 people in a two-minute period. And I’m pissed off at how little our government has done about it,” says Mike Monteiro, a web design director in San Francisco whose Twitter feed has become a repository for his and others’ handiwork in getting groups where gun are sold kicked off of Facebook for violating the site’s rules. He estimates that he and his “army of little miscreants” have gotten at least 400 groups banned.

“We found something simple that we could do,” Monteiro says. “I don’t know how big of an effect it’s having. Probably very fucking little, but it’s at least something.” He is unapologetic about reporting Evers to Facebook. “He was offering a free AR-15,” he notes. “I love that we pissed off some Congressman. I hope we ruined his dinner.”

In January, when Facebook banned private sales of guns and ammunition, it was assumed buying a gun on the site would become significantly more difficult. For years the social network had unintentionally facilitated unregulated weapons sales. (There were some limits. In 2014, Facebook restricted posts discussing firearms sales to users over 18 and warned sellers to abide by state and federal laws.) Now, six months after the ban went into effect, it’s clear that Facebook continues to host a bustling arms marketplace, where everything from handguns to rifles are easy to procure, often without a background check.

A Facebook group flagged for violating the site’s ban on private gun sales

The anti-gun Facebook vigilantes readily recount their scores. Malachi Smith says that he’s gotten 93 groups removed, and has “30+ reports in the queue for review right now. My success rate is over 80%,” he wrote in an email. Chris Tacy has taken 74 groups down. Jough Dempsey claims 18 takedowns, including that of a group with 11,000 members. Some discuss their numbers as if they’re setting exercise records. “I have to stop for the day, but hit pers best, 48,” tweeted John Sibley, who has also written a guide to “chasing guns from Facebook.” Gun violence prevention advocates affiliated with groups like Everytown for Gun Safety have reported thousands more removals.

A few months after it implemented its gun-sale ban, Facebook rolled out a feature that makes it easier for users to report posts or pages that describe “the purchase or sale of drugs, guns or regulated products.” But enforcement of the ban is entirely reliant on user reporting. Monteiro and others recount Facebook telling them that flagged groups had not violated its community standards, only to see that determination reversed as more people reported the same groups. One group called Sell Guns for Cash was not removed after being flagged, nor was another group with posts showing images of firearms with prices on them. “When we found out that Facebook had this policy, we thought it was great. We were going to use it to get rid of this stuff. But it’s frustrating how inconsistently it’s being supported,” says Monteiro.

Overzealous gun-group flaggers sometimes hit the wrong targets. The gun-sale ban only affects sales between individuals, not sales by federally licensed firearms dealers. But Facebook has no way of vetting licensed gun sellers. According to Monteiro, pages for brick-and-mortar gun shops have been taken down wrongfully at times.

Gun-selling Facebook groups have found ways to circumvent the site’s restrictions. In March, Forbes reporter Matt Drange found that some groups were becoming private to avoid scrutiny. Others switched from “closed” to “secret,” a status that’s all but invisible to users not already in the group or invited by current members. Some sellers use codes when listing weapons for sale.

These workarounds may indicate something more significant than loopholes in the site’s policy. Chuck Rossi, Facebook’s director of engineering, has become an advocate for gun groups within the company and has helped reinstate gun groups. As also reported by Drange at Forbes, some of the groups Rossi has helped rescued from removal have continued to be forums for private gun deals. Rossi also became the leader of a secret group of administrators for gun pages called “Admin Contact.” According to Forbes, in February Rossi wrote to the group’s members: “I am 100% laser focused on getting your groups back to you so you have a chance to get them to comply with the new policy. It is my sole freaking purpose in life until it is done.” His efforts have helped many groups get out of what’s known as “Facebook jail.”

In a statement to Mother Jones, a Facebook spokesperson emphasized that “The purchase, sale or trade of firearms, ammunition and explosives between private individuals isn’t allowed on Facebook… When a reported post violates Facebook’s policies, that post will be removed, however the group it appeared in will not necessarily be taken down.”

“I report these sites because I’m really, really, really fucking angry. Why isn’t Facebook policing their backyard?” says one flagger, who wishes to remain anonymous. “Why is it still so easy to get a gun? Why can they sell and swap in the open using dirty loopholes? It was maddening to see people pricing, bargaining, and exchanging weapons in the open. The goal of this was to do something—anything.”

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Facebook’s Ban on Gun Sales is Being Enforced by a Few Dedicated Users

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Rep. John Lewis Stages Sit-In to Demand Gun Control Vote

Mother Jones

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Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) led a sit-in on the House floor on Wednesday to demand a vote on the “no fly, no gun” bill, a bipartisan measure that would ban the sale of guns to suspected terrorists on the government’s no-fly list. He was joined by at least a dozen fellow Democrats.

The protest comes in the aftermath of the deadliest mass shooting in American history, which killed 49 people inside an Orlando nightclub on June 12. The massacre prompted a marathon 15-hour filibuster in the Senate to force a vote on gun control bills. On Monday, four gun control measures failed to advance, with nearly every Republican senator voting against them.

Republicans gaveled out of session, therefore blocking C-SPAN from airing the sit-in. Democrats took to social media instead to broadcast the event:

Lewis was a leader in the 1960s civil rights movement and helped organize sit-in demonstrations to challenge segregation laws.

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Rep. John Lewis Stages Sit-In to Demand Gun Control Vote

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The NRA Won’t Defend Donald Trump’s Gun Comments After Orlando

Mother Jones

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High-ranking officials from the National Rifle Association are distancing themselves from Donald Trump’s latest remarks about the Orlando mass shooting, in which the presumptive Republican nominee for president said that club-goers should have been armed—a situation Trump said would have been a “beautiful sight.”

“No one thinks that people should go into a nightclub drinking and carrying firearms,” NRA lobbyist Chris Cox told ABC’s This Week on Sunday. “That defies common sense. It also defies the law. It’s not what we’re talking about here.”

Cox, however, stopped short of completely breaking with Trump’s stance on guns, instead insisting what the real estate magnate meant to say was that if people had arrived to the scene sooner, “fewer people would have died.”

On Friday, Trump sparked a firestorm of controversy by suggesting that armed people with guns strapped to their waists inside the Orlando nightclub could have prevented the worst mass shooting in American history.

“If some of those wonderful people had gun strapped right here—right to their waist or right to their ankle—and one of the people in that room happened to have it and goes ‘boom, boom,’ you know that would have been a beautiful, beautiful sight, folks,” Trump told supporters a rally in Texas.

The comments even prompted a rejection from NRA chief executive Wayne LaPierre, who on Sunday said that he did not believe “you should have firearms where people are drinking.”

The NRA officially endorsed Trump for president in May.

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The NRA Won’t Defend Donald Trump’s Gun Comments After Orlando

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The Orlando Mass Shooter Checked Facebook for News of His Attack As He Killed

Mother Jones

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The massacre in Orlando stands as a grim case in many respects, not least the hateful targeting of the LGBT crowd at the Pulse nightclub, and the highest death toll from a mass shooting in modern US history. Equally dark is that the case builds on some disturbing trends related to the means and motives now seen in mass shootings. One is that the attacker struck with an assault rifle and high-capacity magazines—marking the sixth of nine mass shootings in just the past year alone to be carried out with firearms tantamount to weapons of war.

The other disturbing trend lies with how the perpetrator, Omar Mateen, used digital media. He searched online for inspiration from recent attackers before he struck. And then, as he was unleashing carnage inside the club, he sought to learn if the media was covering the killing in real time.

According to Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, head of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security, Mateen “used Facebook before and during the attack to search for and post terrorism-related content.” Johnson detailed authorities’ knowledge of Mateen’s online activity in a letter sent Wednesday to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in which Johnson called for the company to hand over data connected to the attacker.

As Mateen shot scores of people and held others hostage, according to Johnson’s letter, he searched online for ‘Pulse Orlando’ and ‘Shooting’ during the prolonged siege of the club. (Presumably he did so on a smartphone, though that isn’t detailed in the letter.) Meanwhile, just weeks before the massacre, Mateen researched the couple who pledged allegiance to the Islamic State and committed the massacre in San Bernardino last Decemeber—suggesting that he wanted to follow in their footsteps.

These behaviors underscore a growing concern among leaders in the field of threat assessment that digital technology has compounded the danger of future attacks. As I reported in a Mother Jones cover story last fall, there is emerging forensic evidence showing that social media has both exacerbated a copycat effect and become a prime tool for mass shooters seeking infamy.

Last August in Virginia, an enraged ex-television reporter carried out what was dubbed “the first social media murder”: He gunned down two of his former colleagues on live television while filming it with a camera of his own. He then posted the footage on Twitter and Facebook as he fled, shortly before dying in a police pursuit.

Less than 48 hours after the massacre in Orlando last Sunday, a 25-year-old man in France stabbed an off-duty police officer and his female companion to death, and then proceeded to film himself live on Facebook from inside the couple’s home. He declared his allegiance to the Islamic State and pondered what he might do with their terrified 3-year-old son, who was in the background. (The boy apparently remained physically unharmed after police raided the home and killed the attacker soon thereafter.)

“This is so much what we thought would happen, this increasing use of social media,” says Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and threat assessment expert who consults for the FBI and foreign security agencies. “I think we’re going to see more of this movement toward real-time broadcasting of these events, or individuals looking for the level of coverage of the events in real time.” Digital media offers a big platform for attackers to feed their pathological narcissism, he explains, “fulfilling their desire to be seen and to gain notoriety.”

Orlando epitomizes just how difficult it can be to untangle motive in a mass shooting, especially with so-called lone wolves (a term Meloy and others suggest is unhelpful to mitigating the copycat problem.) Was it a terrorist attack? A hate crime? The act of a disturbed person secretly struggling with his sexual identity? Quite possibly it was all of the above—and we may never really know, as security expert and author Peter Bergen wrote this week.

Many mass shooters display behaviors that fall along a spectrum of the criminal, clinical, and ideological, explains Meloy. Investigators are still piecing together a picture of Mateen’s background and his pathway to the Pulse nightclub. But while the term “terrorism” obviously applies to the massacre, Mateen’s stated allegiance to a violent extremist group—he’d also boasted about Al Qaeda and Hezbollah in the past—may have been more related to the clinical than the ideological.

Becoming a “school shooter” has long been a kind of apex for disturbed young men who gravitate toward going on a gun rampage. Many cases—attacks carried out as well as others averted—have included evidence of the perpetrators aspiring to “do a Columbine.” Now, we may be facing an even more grandiose and chilling phenomenon. “If they pledge to ISIS, in their minds it burnishes their reputations even more because they become a part of a larger and much more frightening movement,” says Meloy. “They also garner much more attention as soon as they pledge allegiance, whether during the fact or just before it.”

The ability of ISIS to exploit deep-seated grievance, rage, and self-loathing in potential recruits has been well documented. Though there still may be much that we don’t know about the Orlando and San Bernardino attackers, there are some astonishing parallels in the two young men: a history marked by personal rage and domestic violence, the abandonment of a young child to go on a suicidal mass-murder mission, and their taking up the ISIS banner shortly before striking.

With the San Bernardino massacre, the perpetrators’ abandonment of their baby struck many as the most incomprehensible detail. In Orlando, observes Meloy, it may well have become a new point of identification for a copycat. “You’ve got a young man who was willing to sacrifice his life and his role as a father—probably for a variety of disturbed reasons, possibly including self-loathing as a homosexual—to satisfy the hatreds and to seek the glory that he’s somehow searching for online, before and while the attack is occurring.”

“I’m truthfully far more interested in the posts from before,” Sen. Johnson said on NPR’s Morning Edition, “to see if there’s anything possible we could’ve learned to prevent this attack, as opposed to what a sick person, a deranged person was actually doing online while he was slaughtering our fellow citizens.”

Beyond the toxic brew of motive and any further details that may emerge about the attack planning, the whole world is now very familiar with Mateen’s selfies—including the next potential mass shooter. For threat assessment professionals, all of it is troubling new evidence as they continue to focus on stopping the next one.

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The Orlando Mass Shooter Checked Facebook for News of His Attack As He Killed

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Here Are 25 Statements Republicans Gave About the Massacre in Orlando. Guess Which Word None of Them Used?

Mother Jones

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In the aftermath of Sunday’s horrific shooting at Pulse nightclub in Orlando that killed 49 people and injured 53 others, many politicians have extended condolences to the families of the victims and expressed solidarity with the city of Orlando. President Obama addressed the nation from the Oval Office on Sunday, and all three remaining presidential candidates issued statements condemning the attack.

But among responses from conservatives, there’s a trend worth noting: They repeatedly fail to acknowledge that the shooting victims were targeted because they were gay or transgender. Dozens of statements from lawmakers acknowledge “the victims and their families” without mentioning what the victims had in common. Others highlight the role of Islamic radicalization but ignore blatant homophobia. Take a look at these 25 statements on the shooting that sidestep the identity that the victims shared.

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Here Are 25 Statements Republicans Gave About the Massacre in Orlando. Guess Which Word None of Them Used?

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This Is the Assault Rifle Used by the Orlando Mass Shooter

Mother Jones

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The MCX “innovative weapon system.” Sig Sauer

Since the Orlando massacre early Sunday morning, pro-gun pundits have come out in force to argue that the weapon used in the attack is not an assault rifle. The gun lobby prefers to call these weapons “modern sporting rifles,” euphemistic ammo it can fire in an ongoing semantic debate. But make no mistake: What the Orlando attacker used was a weapon of war. It was designed to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. Witness this harrowing audio captured by a bystander outside the Pulse nightclub in which Omar Mateen fires 24 shots in 9 seconds.

According to a federal law enforcement official, the rifle Mateen used to murder and maim more than 100 people was a Sig Sauer MCX. Mateen legally purchased the weapon, similar to an AR-15, on June 4 in Port St. Lucie, Florida, near where he lived. (He legally purchased a Glock 17 handgun the following day, which he also carried during the attack.)

Sig Sauer bills the MCX as “an innovative weapon system built around a battle-proven core.” The company says it “stands as the first rifle to be silenced from the ground up. It also accepts a broad array of accessories, enabling you to build a complete weapon system for any scenario or environment.” It has a military-spec trigger and a magazine capacity of 30 rounds. According to the book Guns of Special Forces 2001-2015, the MCX is known in military circles as the “Black Mamba” and was developed at the request of the US Army’s special operations forces.

Although the legal civilian version of the gun fires on semi-automatic, it can be highly lethal. Indeed, like many of his recent predecessors, Mateen was able to unleash a devastating barrage of gunfire. The law enforcement official declined to comment on the total number of rounds fired in the attack. But, he said, it was “obviously a lot.”

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This Is the Assault Rifle Used by the Orlando Mass Shooter

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President Obama’s Plan to Make America Smarter About Guns

Mother Jones

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On Friday, President Barack Obama released a plan for the federal government to promote the development of smart-gun technology. The guns, also known as “personalized firearms,” employ biometric or other sensor technologies to prevent them from being fired by anyone other than their owners.

“Today, many gun injuries and deaths are the result of legal guns that were stolen, misused, or discharged accidentally,” Obama said in a Facebook post. “As long as we’ve got the technology to prevent a criminal from stealing and using your smartphone, then we should be able to prevent the wrong person from pulling a trigger on a gun.”

Obama began advocating smart guns in January, as part of his latest push to confront America’s costly gun violence crisis. He ordered the departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security to develop a strategy to promote the technologies and expedite government procurement of the weapons. The report released Friday details the following initiatives:

By October, the departments of Justice and Homeland Security will establish requirements that smart-gun manufacturers need to meet in order for their guns to be purchased by law enforcement agencies. They will also identify agencies willing to participate in a smart-gun pilot program.
The Department of Defense will help manufacturers test smart-gun technologies at the US Army Aberdeen Test Center in Maryland. Manufacturers will be eligible to win cash prizes for successful designs.
The Department of Justice has authorized agencies to apply certain federal grants to the purchase of smart guns.

Gun companies first pursued smart guns in the 1990s, in part at the urging of the Clinton administration. Colt, Smith & Wesson, and O.F. Mossberg & Sons developed prototypes. The products were shelved, however, when market research showed consumers didn’t trust the weapons—and after the National Rifle Association and other gun rights activists denounced the companies for a product they claimed was a Trojan horse for gun control.

The recent rise in mass shootings has helped renew interest in smart guns, including among investors in Silicon Valley. The Smart Tech Challenges Foundation, created by angel investor Ron Conway after the 2012 Newtown massacre, has handed out about $1 million in funding to gun safety startups. One grant recipient was Jonathan Mossberg, a former Mossberg & Sons VP and the developer of the iGun, a shotgun that will only fire if the shooter is wearing a special ring. Mossberg, who is working on miniaturizing his technology for handguns, told me by phone on Friday that Obama’s efforts could “raise a whole lot of interest and give people a sense of this market.”

By one estimate, smart guns may be a $1 billion slice of the industry. The White House initiative could help create more opportunity in the major market for supplying law enforcement agencies. Mossberg and a handful of other smart-gun developers have long been trying to get police departments interested in their weapons; an estimated 5 to 10 percent of police deaths occur when officers’ own firearms are used against them. Some law enforcement leaders have shown support for adopting the technology, including San Francisco Police Chief Greg Suhr.

But strong opposition continues: The NRA remains sharply critical of Obama’s policy, which suggests the gun industry is likely to follow suit and ignore efforts on the technology. The Fraternal Order of Police, a national interest group representing the rank and file, is also signaling skepticism. “Police officers in general, federal officers in particular, shouldn’t be asked to be guinea pigs in evaluating a firearm nobody’s even seen yet,” FOP Director James Pasco told Politico. “We have some very, very serious questions.” (Politico failed to note that a charity run by the FOP has received at least $125,000 since 2010 from another conservative gun lobbying group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation.)

Obama on Friday also announced several other gun safety initiatives, including a proposed rule requiring the Social Security Administration to better report mental-illness information to the federal background check system, and a gun violence prevention conference to be hosted by the White House in May.

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President Obama’s Plan to Make America Smarter About Guns

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Samantha Bee Demonstrates How Frighteningly Easy it Is to Purchase a Gun

Mother Jones

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On the latest Full Frontal, Samantha Bee took us on her quest to rent the costume of the National Rifle Association’s esteemed gun safety mascot, Eddie Eagle. But doing so proved to be a surprisingly onerous process—one that required filling out an 18-page application and dealing with the group’s mandatory 20-day waiting period before anyone can get their hands on Eddie’s gear.

Compare that to the relatively simple task of acquiring a gun, whether it be online, at your run-of-the-mill gun shop, or at a gun show in New Mexico:

“Are you a felon?” one gun own seller in New Mexico asked a Full Frontal producer.

“No,” she replied.

“Ok.”

Another gun secured! As the episode goes on, Bee and her team are able to add to their arsenal with frightening ease, all while being repeatedly denied an elusive Eddie Eagle costume.

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Samantha Bee Demonstrates How Frighteningly Easy it Is to Purchase a Gun

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Ted Cruz Used A Line From The Aaron Sorkin Film "The American President"

Mother Jones

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It seems clear that this wasn’t plagiarism so much as an homage but it’s still weird.

It would be funny if he had said, “I’m gonna get the guns.”

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Ted Cruz Used A Line From The Aaron Sorkin Film "The American President"

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America’s Rash of School Shooting and Bomb Threats Continues

Mother Jones

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School officials sent home nearly 2,000 students after receiving a bomb threat at McLean High School in northern Virginia at approximately 8:00 a.m. Monday morning. The Washington Post reports:

The 10th largest school district in the country, Fairfax County schools face nearly daily threats. Security officials have said that threats come in frequently through the Internet and social media and that they investigate about 100 cases a year.

Earlier this year, fake bomb threats closed schools in six states, and in 2015 a threat forced school officials in Los Angeles to cancel classes for the second largest school system in the country.

Schools throughout the nation have been facing a rash of shooting and bomb threats. One study suggests that such threats are on the rise. In February 2015, Kenneth Trump, the president of the National School Safety and Security Services, released a study that reviewed 812 threats reported in the media from the first half of the 2014-15 school year. Threats had risen 158 percent since the first time he conducted the study in the previous year.

However, there is no comprehensive national data on school threats, and no mandate for schools or law enforcement to track them, so it’s diffucult to discern if the problem is in fact a rising trend. Meanwhile, also on Monday four students were reported injured in a school shooting in Ohio. Read more about the ongoing wave of threats to schools in our recent explainer here.

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America’s Rash of School Shooting and Bomb Threats Continues

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