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Facebook Expands Online Commerce Role, But Says "No Guns, Please"
The New York Times reports that Facebook's newly staked-out role as a site to facilitate local, person-to-person sales (ala Craigslist) has a new wrinkle: the site has announced a site-wide policy restricting firearms sales that applies to personal sales, though not to licensed dealers or gun clubs. According to the story,
Although Facebook was not directly involved in gun sales, it has served as a forum for gun sales to be negotiated, without people having to undergo background checks. The social network, with 1.6 billion monthly visitors, had become one of the worldâ(TM)s largest marketplaces for guns and was increasingly evolving into an e-commerce site where it could facilitate transactions of goods. ... Facebook said it would rely on its vast network of users to report any violations of the new rules, and would remove any post that violated the policy. Beyond that, the company said it could ban users or severely limit the ways they post on Facebook, depending on the type and severity of past violations. If the company believed someoneâ(TM)s life was in danger, Facebook would work with law enforcement on the situation.
The policy applies as well to private sales that occur using Facebook Messenger, though the company does not scan Messenger exchanges and must rely on user reports.
Guns don't kill, unregulated easy access to firearms does.
Um... actually...
Firstly, private gun sales are legal. Facebook is making a blanket policy which is politically charged, which could also be applied to arranging abortions, distasteful speech, consensual sex of any non-mainstream type, and a host of others that anyone can come up with after a few minutes thought.
So in effect, they are suppressing behaviour that is completely legal.
Secondly, although guns do seem to kill a lot of people, the overall statistic of importance to check is "average expected lifespan", which is much *higher* in areas where there is easy legal access to guns.
To put this another way, if you let your kids play in the yard of a gun owner, their chance of being killed by that gun go way up, but their chances of death by *all causes* go down. If you can't maintain proper nutrition or medicine for a time because you got robbed, it affects your overall lifespan. If your neighbor has guns, it has a protective effect on you because criminals tend to go elsewhere, and so on.
Thirdly, if you like to compare England to the US, consider this Harvard study which finds (journal page 656):
[...] despite constant and substantially increasing gun ownership, the United States saw progressive and dramatic reductions in criminal violence in the 1990s.On the other hand, the same time period in the United Kingdom saw a constant and dramatic increase in violent crime to which England’s response was evermore drastic gun control including, eventually, banning and confiscating all handguns and many types of long guns. Nevertheless, criminal violence rampantly increased so that by 2000 England surpassed the United States to become one of the developed world’s most violenceridden nations..
To conserve the resources of the inundated criminal justice system, English police no longer investigate burglary and “minor assaults.” As of 2006, if the police catch a mugger, robber, or burglar, or other “minor” criminal in the act, the policy is to release them with a warning rather than to arrest and prosecute them.
Easy access to firearms actually protects people.
Personally, I dislike being mugged, robbed, burgled, and assaulted in *minor* manners, but