We don’t do a lot of opinion pieces in the GunsAmerica Blog. This is the first one in fact. New York City’s mayor Bloomberg announced the results of a new sting conducted by his office today, focusing on internet gun sales. He is using the same tactics he has employed to go after legal gun sales at gun shows, implying that American gun owners are by nature dishonest and willing to break the law to sell their firearms. Would you break a federal law for $450, or even ten times that? Probably not. American gun owners are law abiding citizens and proud of our long history of supporting law enforcement and the laws as they are written, even if we disagree with them.
As usual, the facts are skewed all over the place, vague where Bloomberg chooses to be vague, and specific and factual where he has an anecdotal soundbyte or video clip he can play. Thankfully they do not appear to involve GunsAmerica sellers, but this is only the tip of the iceberg and if we don’t say something nobody will. Unfortunately Diane Sawyer and the talking heads at ABC News don’t question the sketchy report as usual, and we have received no questions from them, from law enforcement or from Mayor Bloomberg’s office to request for comments. CNN seems to have lost the picture of me from 1999, but you may remember that Chuck Schumer tried to regulate internet gun sales back then. The article is here, and they even brought me into a little secret CNN studio in Boston to do an interview. As I explained to Mr. Schumer back then, the gun grabbers just don’t have their facts straight. American gun owners by and large are overwhelmingly honest and law abiding. At least Schumer in 1999 wasn’t deliberately manipulating the facts for political gains.
I wonder why GunsAmerica is not mentioned? Could it be that Bloomberg targeted unknown, old, dead and dying websites that have no supervision over who comes and goes, then targeted specific ads that appear to have been placed by people who own but know little about guns? He does mention Craigslist, which of course has a NO GUNS POLICY, similar to Ebay, Amazon and other national online for-sale and auction websites. And the article does mention our only major competitor, Gunbroker, as if they are the Kleenex of internet gun sales, but according to Compete.com, it is GunsAmerica that has the most unique visitors looking for guns these days, even without a NASCAR sponsorship. Go figure.
Bloomberg says that the BATFE is not doing their job, be we know they are, and they do it well. We are generally in weekly contact with the US Department of Justice. They know we have a “no subpoena” policy and they ask us to investigate suspect accounts all the time. We have also been involved with several cases over the years involving state and local police agencies, mostly to catch scammers who never possessed any guns, and BATF (now E) has always know that we have an open policy with anything they need from us. Since the Patriot Act, several federal agencies, including BATFE, monitor GunsAmerica every day. Over 3 million people come and go from here every month (about twice what is shown on Compete, as measured by Google Analytics). Even though we don’t agree with all of the laws, we support law enforcement efforts to catch the actual bad guys. Bad guys make law abiding American gun owners look bad, and we want them in jail as quickly as possible.
Yet despite our almost 15 year record of complete cooperation with law enforcement, no calls or emails from Bloomberg. I wonder why?