It’s Far Too Easy to Buy a Gun

Alex is a gun enthusiast who likes to go to the shooting range. He is very suspicious of gun control efforts and voted against a Nevada ballot measure to expand background check requirements to cover private firearm sales in the state. When my friend Allan and I asked him to purchase a gun from a private dealer, as part of our attempts to show just how easy it is to buy a gun in America, Alex agreed. But he felt sure that our experiment with him would fail. Surely no responsible gun owner would sell him a weapon online without putting him through a background check first!

The idea for this project originated in January 2018, when I partnered with NowThis, a popular digital news service, to go out to Las Vegas and visit the Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show, the gun industry’s largest trade show. The event was taking place just three months after and a little over a mile away from the largest individual mass murder in modern American history. The October 1, 2017, shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival left 58 people dead and 851 injured. SHOT Show wouldn’t provide NowThis with press credentials to officially cover the event, but we were spending three days in Las Vegas anyway. We wanted to see if it was easier to obtain a firearm in Nevada than talk to the people at SHOT Show.

Allan and I logged on to Armslist and saw it all: handguns, assault weapons, bump stocks, etc. We just needed a Nevada resident to execute the purchase. (Federal guidelines prohibit a seller from transferring a gun to someone with an out-of-state license.) Luckily, Alex, a member of our crew, was in the market for a handgun and agreed to participate in our story.

Alex’s love for guns is rooted in tragedy. His mother was gunned down when he was younger, and he believes that, had she had a gun to protect herself, she would still be with him today.

It took Alex just a couple of minutes to find a revolver he liked, and moments later the seller responded to his query. I remember telling Allan, “Wow! It would’ve taken longer for me to leave the hotel room where we are filming, get in line at Starbucks, and bring us back coffees than it did to set up that gun sale.” We had spent ten minutes searching for a gun online and another five minutes waiting for our private seller to respond. In fifteen minutes, Alex was ready to drive out and pick up the firearm. As he took off with another member of our crew, Allan and I waited in our hotel room nervously.

We wondered if our experiment would work. Would a private seller really agree to sell an instrument designed to kill to another—no questions asked?

Less than three hours after we first started looking for a gun to buy, Alex walked back into our room with a revolver wrapped inside a little black bag that resembled a sock. He told us it took him less than five minutes to meet with the seller (an elderly man who seemed to be unloading his stockpile of weapons), hand over the money, take the gun, and get back into the car. The seller did not check any criminal database for Alex’s name and did not ask him why he needed the gun or whether he knew how to use it. He didn’t even try to find out if Alex’s ID was authentic.

“He did do a bill of sale with his information,” Alex said. “He had a copy that I put my information down, but that is it. I could have had a fake ID and put whatever I wanted down here and I could have walked away with a gun.” He added rather grimly, “I’ll be honest with you—it does not really sit well with me.”

“At the very least, make it a little bit more difficult for someone to get their hands on a firearm,” Alex told me. “It is pretty eye-opening. I’m pretty embarrassed with myself that I voted the other way, because this needs to be changed. You should not be able to get a gun that easily.”

The United States suffers from a high number of mass shootings, everyday gun violence, and suicides because we have too many guns and they are too easy to get. In many states, it’s easier to get a gun than to buy a beer. The United States allows practically anyone to acquire a firearm. People do not need a license to purchase one, and they don’t need to show that they know how to use it. They just need to pony up the dollars.

Under our current laws, practically anybody can get a gun this way in many states throughout America. Are you a murderer? No problem, you can buy a gun from an unlicensed private seller. Did time for armed robbery? That’s okay! Hit up another bank with a weapon you purchase online. Have a temporary restraining order for stalking your partner? You don’t even have to go online for a gun; federal law is so weak, you can pass a background check! Convicted of threatening a mosque or a synagogue? No worries! The background-check system will clear you, too! Federal law prohibits convicted felons, domestic abusers, and people with histories of involuntary mental health treatment from passing a background check and buying a weapon from a federally licensed dealer, but you can almost always get around these prohibitions by buying from a private seller.

Most gun sellers are responsible, but many are no angels.¹ An undercover investigation in New York City found that 62 percent of private online firearm sellers made a sale even after a buyer disclosed that she or he could not pass a background check! The man who sold Alex his firearm did not know if Alex was a convicted criminal or another prohibited person. He chose not to ask, and, under our current broken system, he was under no obligation to do so. In a country where guns are ridiculously easy to get, gun deaths, as we shall see in the chapters ahead, are all too common.