President Barack Obama’s administration on Monday decided to expand its war on law-abiding gun owners to a war on friends advertising guns to friends.
Speaking on Facebook’s recent decision to prohibit groups that allow people to advertise firearms for sale, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters: “Obviously, we welcome steps from private entities like Facebook.”
We should take a deeper look at that statement, however. Like other Internet entities, guns are not bought and sold on Facebook—they are simply advertised. Under federal law, anyone “buying a firearm” over the Internet must pass an FBI background check and have the gun delivered to a federally licensed dealer. Federal law does not bar law-abiding Americans from privately selling firearms to one another, or from discussing what guns they might wish to sell. In effect, Obama is cheering the fact that Facebook is making life a little more inconvenient for law-abiding gun owners who are following federal law.
