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eBay's Ill-Timed Lifetime Achievement Webby
theodp writes "eBay CEO Meg Whitman will accept a special Webby Lifetime Achievement Award next month on behalf of the eBay Community, which has 'permanently changed the way people connect, discover and interact with each other.' Perhaps by then, people will have forgotten how eBay enabled buyer 'Blazers5505' to hook up with sellers like 'oneclickshooting' just weeks before the worst mass shooting in modern US history, prompting eBay to issue a gun-parts-don't-kill-students-guns-and-ammo-do statement that showed little evidence of its celebrated commitment to social consciousness. CEO Whitman, who received $11.1M last year for her leadership efforts, has kept a low profile since tooting eBay's trust-and-safety horn for Wall Street analysts two days after the Va. Tech rampage."
By "empty clips" the linked article meant "magazines," as of course you know. Technical quibbling about terminology is just trolling.
Yup, same guy. If it's necessary to give him a soapbox, perhaps you could at least remove the dishonest framing of these pieces as news?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
He didn't buy bullets, he bought empty magazines and a gun holster.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
If a bank robber makes his getaway in a Ford, it doesn't mean that Ford is somehow responsible for the robbery. If a pair of kidnappers co-ordinate their activities via a Nokia phone on the Verizon network, it doesn't make Nokia and Verizon responsible for their actions. And if a drunken husband grabs a butcher knife purchased at Target and kills his wife with it, neither Target nor the knife maker has any responsibility.
The real agenda of the person who wrote this spin is to say, "Guns and any associated parts are bad. If you deal with weapons in any way, you are evil. Therefore, eBay is evil because it doesn't have the policy I want it to have."
Individuals have to take responsibility for what they do, and the rest of us have to keep a sense of proportion about how we react to the actions of crazed lunatics. Statistically, somewhere in the neighborhood of 120 people have died in this country in car accidents in the last 24 hours, but nobody is stupid enough or irresponsible enough to suggest that the utility of car travel be taken away from everyone else because of these deaths. Bad things happen sometimes in life. Sometimes we can't control all of them. We will NEVER have a completely safe world -- and it's not going to made perfect by following the panicked political agenda of those who insist that the rights of millions be destroyed (especially when their favored course of action wouldn't even save lives).
David
Ebay is even more restrictive when it comes with magazines (clips are what Garands use). They only allow restrictive capacity magazines (10 rounds or less) to be sold despite that standard capacity magazines are allowed to be owned by private citizens in all but a handful states.
I know it's not a big deal. It certainly doesn't bother me when folks call magazines clips, but just in case anyone out there wanted to be informed what the difference is:
A magazine is enclosed. All the bullets are inside of it. These are the things you see on TV.
A clip is a length of metal retainer that bullets slide onto. It holds them in a row and feeds into (my opinion) antiquated weapons. Picture: http://www.swissrifles.com/ammo/comparison.jpg
There are also belts (like rambo used) and drums (which is a neatly folded belt in a box)
I bought my magazines on ebay. The ones that came with my pistol are expensive and I wanted cheap ones for when I practice (ten dollars each vs 35 dollars each). I fail to see the issue here. I can buy magazines in town without any problems anyway. Some psycho guy could easily make a bomb or buy illegal weapons. Yeah, this time he used legal means to get armed. It's worth considering that the recent mall shooting and all the school shootings occurred in gun free zones, that some school shootings have been stopped by legal gun-owners, and that there are plenty of reasonable complaints to make against ebay without this silliness.
eh, whatever.
Controlling the flow of guns and other weapons is much easier than controlling, say, an mp3 of Lars Ulrich screaming or a certain hex number recently made famous. Guns are physical objects made of atoms, and somehow, by person to person meeting or the US Mail or a drop point or something, they must be passed from one person to the other.
It makes little sense to attempt to ban advertisements for gun sales on craigslist, gun sales on ebay, or posts of the same on usenet. If transfering the weapon between the two individuals is a crime, they will eventually have to meet somewhere or mail something to do it.
It would make far more sense for the online forums to simply allow the posts. The authorities can browse ebay and read craigslist also, and take appropriate action if illegal activity seems planned.
If you want to stop a routine illegal gun trade, for example someone running a mail-order firearms business that delivers accross state lines to P.O. Boxes, then the best ways to go about it are already well known and used by law enforcement. They can sting the seller by purchasing the guns themselves, just like they did to Cheech Marin when he was selling bongs and other societally threatening material via mail order. They can place a simple metal detector at central package trans-shipment facilities, and select some subset of packages to actually x-ray, and then check the address against the list of Federally Licensed Firearm dealers; this is similar to how they occasionally sniff large numbers of packages with dogs and select a few for further investigation. The point of all these exercises is to make sure you can't go into the contraband market for very long without eventually being caught, and it limits the blackmarket to a constantly turning over population of the stupid and desparate.
After all, they pay agents to sit around prentending to be 8 year olds to catch weirdos whacking off at home. Why can't they click over to ebay or craigslist when there is a slow moment in the spank-to-child-fucking chatrooms ?
Unlike drugs or child porn, some firearms transactions on ebay might be legal. For ebay to ban all of them doesn't help law enforcement catch anyone.
Ebay's banning of firearms transactions are simply pandering to people such as wrote this slashdot article. Ebay, like many big companies and big institutions like colleges, tries very hard to avoid controversy; when threatened with controversy by whatever hysterical group has popped up, they seek to shut them up. The result has no effect on the population of unethical weapons dealers, it just clutters the newspapers and slashdot.
gunbroker link
This is an eBay-like setup for people to sell guns across the internet. Before the anti-gun hyperventilators (like the submitter) start, guns can only be shipped to a Federal Firearms License holder (or a C&R, but that's a special case that I won't go into). You then go to them and have a federal background check performed on you, and you pick up your gun.
Many computer nerds I know often buy rare machineguns this way. (no, not semi-auto Democrat-newspeak "assault weapons", real belt-fed working machineguns like MG-42s and M2HBs as well as full auto assault rifles like the M16)
Occasionally, a 105mm howitzer (includes 20 rounds free!), RPG, or 20mm anti-aircraft cannon will show up on gunbroker as well. Yes, private citizens can easily own WORKING assault rifles, frag grenades, machineguns, howitzers, smart bombs, and anti-aircraft cannons. No legal citizen-owned machinegun, mortar, bomb, howitzer, or grenade has ever been used in any crime. Ever.
It's also interesting to note that there's no explicit regulation prohibiting you from owning, say , a nuclear-armed cruise missile - it's just you can't find anyone willing to sell them to you.
Why is it that a certain segment of the gun-owning populace immediately jumps to the conclusion that there's some grand-scale movement to try to completely ban guns every time limitations on gun ownership are brought up?
Gee, I dunno.
http://www.controlarms.org/
http://www.bradychamppaign.org/
"If it were up to me,I would tell Mr. and Mrs. America to turn them in--turn them all in." -Dianne Feinstein
-=Maggie Leber=-
Why is it that a certain segment of the gun-owning populace immediately jumps to the conclusion that there's some grand-scale movement to try to completely ban guns every time limitations on gun ownership are brought up?
Maybe it is because there is.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/april2007/2 00407banguns.htm
http://www.gunscholar.org/gunban.htm
http://vgoc.org/VGOCNov04.pdf
As an amusing note, probably due to the amount of ammunition expended, news programs were claiming that the Clinton weapons ban that expired would have prevented him from killing so many people because of the "high-capacity" magazines. They didn't seem to realize that it's quite easy to carry a satchel full of loaded 10-round (legal during the ban) magazines and exchange them quickly with some practice-- which is what Cho did.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
What do you expect?
Look at the "editor". kdawson again. He's responsible for more troll and flambeiat crap than anyone else on slashdot. What I want to know is why they gave him editor powers - and why he stall has them after he blatantly abuses them time after time to promote his agenda? This article is from a personal log here by Theodp (again, seems to be a kdawson fave), and is so poorly written and poorly reasoned that its obviously carp. If kdawson keeps falling for this and posting irrelevant crap, they need to get rid of him as an editor.
If I want to red this kind of specious attack on capitalism, ebay or guns, I can go get it at indymedia or daily Kos.
Hey KDawson, keep it up, you'll enter Katz territory soon. Everyone: I advise tagging stories like this "kdawsontroll"
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
During the ban, I purchased a Yugoslavian SKS, complete with bayonet and grenade launcher. Since it was manufactured in the 1960s, it was in no way, shape, or form illegal. I had also purchase an SLR-95 (A Bulgarian-made AK47 with a milled receiver) with a thumbhole stock, which was manufactured during the ban. No pistol grip and came with a 10-round magazine, thus completly legal. I picked up several 30-round magazines and a 100-round drum magazine, also completely legal as they wer manufactured pre-ban. Put them together, you have a semi-automatic AK47 capable of firing 100 rounds without a reload or a magazine change. And, all legal. So, did the SAW ban do anything at all? No!
I know trying to make a point on forums is futile, but there is a strong argument that when the amendment was written "regulated" meant equipped, and the militia was all male citizens capable of bearing arms in defense of the state.
It is not unreasonable to suggest modification to the contemporary meaning of these terms, but current gun control/ownership laws do not attempt to set boundaries on what constitutes a militia, which in the last gun ownership case ruled upon by the supreme court meant pretty much everybody. Without a new definition for militia in place, most restrictions, like concealed carry permit requirements, could very easily be ruled unconstitutional. As far as what guns the militia is allowed to have, the laws tend to focus on the most militarily useful guns, which is at odds with the idea of a self-equipped militia. Not to mention that the supreme court did say that the government could only restrict the ownership of guns that would have no use in war, which specifically focused on sawed-off shotguns for whatever reason.
Paraphrased, as far as the constitution is concerned, everybody who can vote is part of the militia, and they can have any combat effective gun they can afford. An X day waiting period, background check beyond current voter registration, or limitations of weapons based on rate of fire or magazine capacity are unconstitutional so far as they prevent the militia (read: you, probably) from being well regulated.
{sarcasm} Now I win, so change your mind. {/sarcasm}
Apathy; it does a body good.