The GAO And Illegal Internet Gun Sales

Published under creative commons.

The Government Accountability Office serves as the investigative arm of Congress. While not a law enforcement agency, they do investigate many things. Often, their investigations surround financial matters since much of what Congress does is pay for stuff with our money, but that’s not all they do.

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Recently, the GAO decided to try and buy some guns on the internet. Not the dark web or anything like that, but the same internet you and I use on a regular basis.

Guess how it went.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) ended a study late last year designed to determine ease of illegal purchases of firearms on line. Results released on Nov. 21, 2017, indicate that zero of its 72 attempts resulted in a successful transaction on the “Surface Web”—that part of the Internet, like here, that doesn’t run with a secondary encryption software to hide identities.

It’s “searchable with standard web search engines,” the report explains. “Furthermore, in 5 of these 72 attempts, the accounts GAO set up were frozen by the websites, which prevented the agents from using the forums and attempting to make a purchase.”

Taking place over two years, you’d think they’d have figured out how to make one illegal purchase, but they didn’t. Not a one.

While this should be heralded as good new for anti-gun zealots, it won’t be. After all, this proves that the laws currently on the books work just fine and that new laws aren’t needed. That negates pretty much their entire reason for existing.

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Meanwhile, those who know how can access the dark web can buy anything if they’ve got the cash, regardless of the law. After all, you can buy people on the dark web. Buying guns is small potatoes in that game.

Yet we’re constantly told you can buy guns right off the internet with no background check and have them shipped right to your door.

Of course, anyone familiar with firearms knows this is complete and total bull, yet the stories persist. They continue to spread it not because they haven’t been informed their wrong, but because it’s inconvenient to accept that they’re wrong. Even if they understand it, they can’t act like they understand it, otherwise…

Well, who knows why, but they simply won’t show their fellow anti-gun jihadis that the internet isn’t facilitating gun sales to criminals.

Here’s the proof, though. Over two years, the GAO–operating mostly under the Obama administration, I might add–couldn’t manage to pull off one illegal gun sale via the internet.

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Now, that’s not to say that it never happens. I’m sure that it does, and not just on the dark web. However, criminal acts take place all the time via the internet, but it doesn’t make them any more legal.

What we do see is just how rarely such acts are. If this were a common occurrence, it seems clear that the GAO would have had no trouble finding guns to buy illegally. But they did. They had so much trouble they couldn’t even pull off one illegal buy.

Just remember that the next time some annoying gun grabber starts talking about buying guns off the internet.

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