US News

‘Craigslist for guns’ full of unlicensed sellers: Bloomberg

Two days before the first anniversary of the Newtown school massacre, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled a new investigation that found thousands of guns could be sold illegally by unlicensed firearms dealers on just one classified ad Web site, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group co-founded by Bloomberg, monitored the ads on Armslist.com – the classified marketplace, known as a “Craigslist for guns,” – for eight weeks.

They found that nearly one-third of gun ads on the site were posted by high-volume sellers who do not possess the mandatory federal firearms license.

At that pace, nearly 244,000 guns would be sold illegally a year due to the “private sale loophole,” which does not require a background check, Bloomberg said Thursday.

“Unlicensed sellers of firearms are flooding the Internet with weapons,” Bloomberg said at City Hall news conference. “The result is a massive online, largely unregulated, secondhand firearms market that threatens the safety of all of us.”

A representative from ArmsList.com did not immediately return a request for comment.

The inquiry was a follow-up to one the gun-control group did earlier this year in which investigators secretly conducted background checks of would-be buyers and found that many of them had felony records that, by law, prohibit them from buying firearms.

“It’s important to remember that nothing has changed in Washington (about gun control) since Newtown – despite the fact that the vast majority of American people favor basic steps that would help keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, criminals, and other dangerous people,” said the mayor.

Twenty children and six adults were slain in the gun rampage by a 20-year-oldr at the Connecticut school last Dec. 14 .