Comments like the above that are sneaked into articles by reporters make me crazy. You cannot buy a gun on ebay... But thousands who read this will unconsciously take it in and believe it and try to defend it in the future.
How many here have bought a firearm off E-bay?
Yeah, I didn't think so.
While I agree that they often exagerate things, and likely were attempting to do so here, you could in fact buy guns off ebay throughout the 90's.
I remember seeing hundreds of thousands of firearms on ebay. People would even sell machine guns believing it was legal if they didn't include the firing pin. I am talking actual belt fed machineguns, not ATF defined "machine gun"s.
"Rocket launchers" were also quite common albiet without the rockets (even though they are basicly just a tube, it would have high shock value in the media.)
I don't know if some were sting operations or not, but there was a lot of fully automatic firearms on Ebay, in addition to traditional firearms. You could even browse by firearm type if I remember correctly and view "machinegun" or something similar.
A very large number of firearms were available on ebay in the 90's, especialy before it became mainstream. Back then Ebay accounts did not even take a credit card to setup, just an email.
Many legal NFA firearms were also featured on ebay. I never purchased any such things, so I don't know if people then proceeded with the legal processes to transfer after someone won, but I do know they were there (at least listed as such.)
I on occasion would browse through the endless pages of firearms, linked ammunition, rocket tubes, and NFA machineguns listed on ebay.
That was ended in 1999, and many of the heavier firepower items had been phased out months prior to that.
Read this article:
http://www.internetnews.com/ec-news/article.php/70301
(first I could find dating back that far)
February 19, 1999
eBay To Stop Listing Firearms, Ammunition
By Cyrus Afzali
Auction site eBay Friday announced that by early March, it will no longer carry listings of firearms and ammunition.
The company said it determined "the Internet is not an appropriate venue for this kind of merchandise." eBay currently has a firearms category and guns are also listed frequently in several other categories.
To meet its deadline to eliminate the listings by March 5, the company said it will accept firearms and ammunition listings until Feb. 26. After that date, any firearms listed on the site will be removed.
"While we acknowledge the gun collectors and sports enthusiasts among our users, eBay takes its role as a responsible member of the online community very seriously," said Steve Westley, eBay's vice president of marketing and business development.
"After careful consideration of the issue, we believe the process of buying and selling firearms online is sufficiently different from the offline world and it is appropriate for us to end the user listing of firearms. . ."
Another concern, Westley said, is persons selling guns and ammunition online are unable to be certain that buyers meet all the legal qualifications to buy guns and ammunition. He said eBay was unable to arrive at an alternative that would have allowed gun sales to continue.
"We realize that the sale of firearms is a controversial issue and our stance will spark support as well as criticism. We are also sensitive to the effect that this policy may have on serious gun collectors. After thorough evaluation, we have decided to end all user listings of firearms and ammunition on eBay in the interests of our site, our users and the offline community."
Then of course in 2007 they expanded that to include firearm accessories and firearm components.
Remember much of the population did not even have emails in the mid 90's, and only those in tech savy fields used computers on a widescale or got online in the early to mid 90's.
I remember getting on the internet back in the 80's before it even existed in the public's mind. HTML did not exist yet, and there was no "web pages" so to speak. However the internet has been there with people trading and using it long before the public was aware of it. "browsing" was a real chore.
The average person did not start using the net until the very late 90's early 2000's. However many people were buying and selling various things on a widescale (including firearms) from the early to mid 1990's on. So there was a few year gap between most of the public being aware, and large scale transactions taking place.
From 1995 to 1999 firearms were sold like anything else on ebay (as well as all over the internet.)
