Armslist.com: Perpetuating Armed Violence in the Age of the Internet
The United States is one of the only Western countries where mass shootings are a common occurrence and are almost normalized in American culture. As a result, gun control has been at the forefront of American politics in recent years. Despite controversy in the wake of numerous mass shootings, firearms remain easy to purchase. Thousands of guns are obtained at an alarming rate through the still active website Armslist.com. Armslist is an online marketplace inspired by Craiglist. Armslist provides a “no questions asked” platform for gun sales, perpetuating gun violence nationwide.
Firearms sold on Armslist are not limited to handguns or hunting rifles typically used for recreational purposes. In the days after the Orlando shootings in 2016, National Public Radio (NPR) found that “semiautomatic weapons comprised at least 1 in 4 firearms listed on Armslist” and “3,800 new ads were posted on the site each day since the mass shootings…on average, 900 of those each day were advertised as semi-automatics [1]. The rise of gun sales after mass shootings can be equated both to the decision to remove weapons from the home or to the desire to obtain more weapons in fear of stricter regulations. More specifically, gun owners become concerned that the crisis will motivate Washington to place stricter controls on weapons purchasing.
Though a visit to their website requires skimming a brief terms of use page, people with a criminal history or intent have virtually no obstacles to purchasing many of the firearms advertised on Armslist. Sellers can advertise that the purchase doesn’t require any type of paperwork of background check. To make this possible, advertisers simply list themselves as private sellers rather than premium vendors, who are “ federally licensed dealers required to conduct background checks” [2]. In this way, dangerous people are able to avoid in-store background checks that might stop them from obtaining a firearm. There are several known cases where this is proven to be true.
First is the case of Radcliffe Haughton, who killed his wife Zina and two others during the 2012 Azana spa shooting [3]. Because of a domestic violence charge from his wife, Haughton was prohibited from legally obtaining a firearm, and thus turned to Armslist where he purchased the murder weapon without a receipt for $500. The tragedy underlines how easily firearms can escalate already dangerous situations of intimate partner violence and the lack of substantive protections against those with criminal intent. Armslist also aided in the purchase of the firearm used by Mohammad Abdulazeez who murdered five in the 2015 Chattanooga shootings [4].
Armslist hides under the guise of a “free speech forum” when faced with legal action. This method has been used by various other websites in the past. Religion News Service states that “In 2010, Craigslist ‘censored’ the lucrative adult/erotic services section of its website after 17 state attorneys general said the service was being used to facilitate illegal sex trafficking and prostitution” — prior to the ruling, Craigslist executive cited free speech [5]. Ross Ulbricht of the banned black market website Silk Road also cried free speech before being shut down by the FBI [6]. Prior to the seizure of Backpage.com by the FBI in April 2018, the website assisted in advertising underage sex workers.Throughout the trial against the CEO of Backpage, company leaders cited the Communication Decency Act in order to evade responsibility for the illicit sex trade within their site [7]. In fact, this provision was cited by all the aforementioned web pages when faced with controversy.
According to Forbes, “in 1996, Congress enacted 47 USC 230 (Section 230), which says that websites aren’t liable for third-party content. Ordinarily, Section 230 protects online marketplaces from liability for user-to-user interactions gone wrong” [8]. Plaintiffs were able to work around the provisions to successfully shut down Silk Road and Backpage by claiming negligence. Despite the large number of deaths already catalyzed by and predicted to happen at the hands of Armslist, the website remains active. A 2013 ruling by a federal judge deepened the issue by claiming that “Armslist ‘owes no duty to the general public to operate its website to control private individual users’ sale of handguns’” [9]. Greater regulations on web pages who facilitate the sales of weapons to people without background checks are necessary. Without action, federal officials look on to cases of senseless violence with senseless apathy.
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