Facebook has banned person-to-person gun sales
The move is an effort to stymie background-check free sales of firearms.
Apparently you could buy and sell guns on Facebook before today. Note the past tense there. The New York Times says that this change is in response to President Obama's recent push for Zuckerberg and Co. to cull the person-to-person transactions from the social network and Instagram -- similar to how it treats sales of marijuana, prescription drugs and other illicit substances. Licensed gun dealers are still fine; the idea here is curbing the background-check-free sales that can occur on a person-to-person basis.
To wit, Reuters writes that Facebook previously nixed firearm advertisements stating "no background check required" or sales that'd cross state lines because those displayed a "willingness to evade the law" around two years ago. Still feel like testing your luck? A Facebook spokesperson tells us the site has systems in place to remove and review listings.
"Over the last two years, more and more people have been using Facebook to discover products and to buy and sell things to one another," head of product policy Monika Bickert tells us in a prepared statement. "We are continuing to develop, test and launch new products to make this experience even better for people and are updating our regulated goods policies to reflect this evolution."
