“…we’re constantly told you can buy guns right off the internet with no background check and have them shipped right to your door.
“Of course, anyone familiar with firearms knows this is complete and total bull, yet the stories persist. They continue to spread it not because they haven’t been informed their wrong, but because it’s inconvenient to accept that they’re wrong.”
The Government Accountability Office serves as the investigative arm of Congress. While not a law enforcement agency, they do investigate many things. Often, their investigations surround financial matters since much of what Congress does is pay for stuff with our money, but that’s not all they do.
Recently, the GAO decided to try and buy some guns on the internet. Not the dark web or anything like that, but the same internet you and I use on a regular basis.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) ended a study late last year designed to determine ease of illegal purchases of firearms on line. Results released on Nov. 21, 2017, indicate that zero of its 72 attempts resulted in a successful transaction on the “Surface Web”—that part of the Internet, like here, that doesn’t run with a secondary encryption software to hide identities.
It’s “searchable with standard web search engines,” the report explains. “Furthermore, in 5 of these 72 attempts, the accounts GAO set up were frozen by the websites, which prevented the agents from using the forums and attempting to make a purchase.”
by Tom Knighton
