Point, Click, Fire: Going undercover

In the leadup to a showdown in Congress over new gun control laws, US President Barack Obama is mounting a furious PR offensive to convince his political opponents to support new legislation mandating background checks for all gun purchases.

Right now, background checks are only required for purchases made from federally licensed firearms dealers. Private sellers, on the other hand, don’t need to conduct a background check or take any information at all, and that loophole has led to an explosion in undocumented online gun sales.

Just how easy is it to get a gun? 16×9 wanted to find out. So we went looking on Armslist.com, one of thousands of websites where gun owners advertise weapons for sale, no background check and no paperwork required.

And the first ad we answered, we were able to arrange a meeting with a young man selling an AR-15 assault rifle, a similar weapon to the one Adam Lanza used to murder 26 children and school staff at Sandy Hook Elementary.

Only a few hours later, we met the man selling the gun in a mall parking lot an hour south of Buffalo, New York. He pulled around the side of the mall and took the brand new military assault rifle straight out of its box.

“Never been fired,” the man said.

It was true. It was pristine and ready for action, for whatever reason we needed it. He didn’t even ask why we wanted it. It didn’t seem to matter.

“It’s all legal,” he said.

Except it wasn’t. Under US federal law, even private sellers are not allowed to sell to anyone out of state, and they’re certainly not allowed to sell to anyone from a different country. He knew we were coming from Toronto – we’d told him on the phone. His answer?

“I don’t care.”

And that is precisely the problem. Private sellers are not required to take any information, so there’s nothing stopping them from selling to people who wouldn’t be able to get a gun from a licensed dealer – criminals, the mentally ill, or citizens of foreign countries.

For several months in 2011, New York City hired private investigators to go undercover and buy guns from online private sellers. More than 60% of the time, they were willing to sell the gun illegally, even when the investigators posing as buyers admitted they wouldn’t pass a background check.

It seems sellers are often willing to break the law because they know there’s little chance of being caught. In the end, 16×9 did not buy the gun, careful not to commit a felony. But we could have. And it only took one phone call and a few hours’ work.