Thousands of felons and others with criminal records that disqualify them from owning guns are trying to buy weapons online, Mayor Bloomberg said Wednesday.
Citing a four-month probe by Mayors Against Illegal Guns — a gun-control advocacy group he co-founded — Bloomberg estimated that more than 25,000 people with criminal histories were circumventing background checks each year by doing their shopping on the Web.
And that was just on one popular Web site, Armslist.com, where 607 buyers were checked out.
“What we found was alarming: One in 30 of these would-be buyers had criminal records that barred them from owning guns,” said Bloomberg, after expressing his condolences to those who lost loved ones in Monday’s mass shooting in Washington, DC.