That’s all it takes for children, felons, and people without IDs to buy illegal weapons on Facebook pages dedicated to the sale and celebration of guns.
A VentureBeat investigation has uncovered dozens of pages on Facebook where guns are for sale, including semi-automatic weapons, handguns, and silencers. While the transactions don’t actually happen on Facebook, the social network is a remarkably easy way to find shady people willing to sell you a weapon — no questions asked. The illegal transactions then take place in diners, dark parking lots, and isolated country roads — away from the prying eyes of the feds and local police.
In Kentucky, Greenup County Sheriff Keith Cooper remembers when a call came into dispatch last October saying a 15-year-old student had been arrested on the Greenup County High School campus for carrying an unlicensed and loaded 9mm handgun to school. The boy was arrested and brought to Cooper’s office for an interview.
When Cooper, a former Kentucky State Trooper with a heavy Southern drawl, asked the kid where he got the gun, his reply was shocking: Facebook.
As it turns out, the 15 year old’s purchase wasn’t an anomaly. Facebook pages have been a thriving market for facilitating gun purchases.
Even in their names, the Facebook fan pages make no attempt to hide what their real purposes are: Firearms Only Alamogordo, Guns for Sale, I Love Guns, and even Guns, Ammo & Blades.
The pages have hundreds of thousands of “likes” and members. While many of the sales are no doubt legitimate — federal law governing gun transactions between individuals are fairly lax — hooking up with illicit buyers and sellers via these pages is easy. For instance, you can buy automatic weapons without a permit, guns with their serial numbers filed off, and weapons that may be prohibited by your state’s laws. If you’re under 18, you can buy a handgun, which federal law prohibits.
On Tuesday, a VentureBeat reporter and his colleague spent less than 15 minutes arranging to buy a semiautomatic 7mm rifle and 90 rounds of ammunition from a guy named “Dave,” a member of Facebook “Firearms Only Alamogordo” fan page (left).
VentureBeat made contact through the fan page, and in the ensuing SMS chat, Dave expressed an eagerness to do the deal. The gun was in good condition, he explained.
Numerous interviews with federal law enforcement authorities, city police agencies, and anti-gun advocacy groups show how they view Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms with growing alarm as highly effective and unregulated online arms bazaars where people who shouldn’t be owning — or selling — guns can find a seemingly endless pool of eager customers with no questions asked.
“We look at Facebook and others as emerging threats for unlawful gun transactions in the United States,” a federal law enforcement officer told VentureBeat.
And as the VentureBeat investigation revealed, some of these guns being purchased through Facebook fan pages are ending up on the playgrounds of American schools.
Dunkel said the ATF, which investigates the unlawful use and possession of guns and explosives in the U.S., has multiple ongoing investigations into illegal gun transactions on social media platforms. Citing the ongoing nature of the cases, she declined to specify them. The investigations are being coordinated through the ATF’s office of strategic intelligence in Washington D.C.
A spokesman at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., declined to comment for this story, referring all questions to the ATF.
For its part, Facebook prohibits the sale or trade of guns, weapons, and explosives through the site and company spokespeople routinely remind reporters that they work with law enforcement on a case by case basis. A spokesperson said that any time user policy violations occur, they are dealt with. Facebook also likes to remind people that it’s not an e-commerce platform.
Oddly, buying and selling firearms on Facebook’s platform has been going on right under Facebook’s nose for far too long to go unnoticed.
In the October 2013 Kentucky case, the boy met the gun seller through a Facebook fan page called Portsmouth Pickers, a page where locals share information on the best fishing holes on the nearby Ohio River, recipes and even trading guns.
Cooper then arrested the seller, a man who drove across the river to sell the gun to the young teen. Because the seller drove across state lines, sold the weapon to a minor and violated federal gun laws, the case was eventually turned over to the feds who indicted him.
As the case unfolded, investigators subpoenaed the kid’s and seller’s IP logs. They were able to clearly read the Facebook chat logs which led to the illegal sale. During the investigation, Cooper learned something else: The seller had been moving illegal handguns through Facebook channels before.
“Our investigation showed more than just the one 9mm,” the friendly Cooper said during a series of phone interviews.
The sheriff said buying unlicensed guns on Facebook is a good way to do it: no paper trail, no registration. Nothing more than cash and a handshake.
The Facebook page “Firearms Only Alamogordo” is a happening place. Members continually post videos of combat shotguns of the kinds Marines used to clear trench lines in World War I, Chinese-made semiautomatic AK-47 assault rifles with 30 round banana clips, and Ruger 9mms. The page is moderated by someone who identifies himself an active member of the U.S. Air Force.
The page has a prominent policy prohibiting the sale of guns to minors.
On a recent thread (right), a flame war erupted between a man who met up with someone he thought was an adult, for the purchase of a rifle. When he showed up, he was met by a minor who opened the door to the trunk of his car to reveal a small arsenal of weapons. When the prospective buyer asked the seller where his father was, the kid said he was sick.
Another recent thread, started by a junior high school student, asked members there if anybody would trade him a gun for his 30 gallon freshwater fish tank.
There were quite a few offers.
The Menlo Park, Calif.-based social media giant has been under fire by an activist group of concerned mothers called Moms Demand Action and the powerful Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a powerful advocacy group co-founded by billionaire and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.
A petition on Change.org to prohibit gun sales on Facebook and Instagram has over 75,000 signatures, and was recommended by Sarah Silverman earlier today.
Earlier this week, Bloomberg’s group, with 1,100 U.S. mayors aboard and over a million supporters, threw down the gauntlet.
“Anybody can go to Facebook and Instagram and buy a gun online. We’re asking them to review their policies. They facilitate the sale of guns in the U.S., said Erika Soto Lamb, a spokeswoman for Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They also launched a petition to get Facebook to the negotiating table.
Facebook and Instagram are currently being used to facilitate sales and trades of firearms between private sellers. Most of these sales and trades can take place without background checks, meaning that there’s no way to stop a Facebook or Instagram user from potentially selling a gun to a felon, a domestic abuser or another dangerous person who would otherwise be prohibited from obtaining a gun. I think of Facebook and Instagram as places to share photos of my kids & family — not as an online market for guns.
It seems to have worked. Facebook and the advocacy groups are currently in discussions about what they can do to curb illegal gun sales through the Facebook platform.
We’ve not yet heard whether the social network is changing its fundamental policies or how they’re enforced.
But if it does, and it succeeds in shutting down social media gun sales, it will make a lot of people in law enforcement very relieved.
Yesterday, the Obama Administration’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services released a six-page report predicting that Obamacare could cause premiums to increase for nearly two-thirds of small- to medium-sized businesses. “This results in roughly 11 million individuals whose premiums are estimated to be higher as a result of the ACA and about 6 million individuals who are estimated to have lower premiums,” CMS writes. But CMS’ projections almost certainly understate the problem, one that will begin to affect millions of workers in the second half of 2014.
The CMS premium report was a requirement imposed by Congress on the administration under the Department of Defense and Full-Year Continuing Appropriations Act of 2011. That law mandated that CMS “provide an estimate of the number individuals and families who will experience a premium increase and the number who will see a decrease” as a result of the Affordable Care Act.
Here’s the background. Under Obamacare, all regulated insurance plans are required to charge people the same premium, regardless of health status. Insurers can charge different rates based on age (but only within a narrow range); tobacco use (smokers can be charged 50 percent more than non-smokers); geographic area (insurers can charge people different rates based on regional demographic variation); and whether the plan is for a single individual or a family.
Before these provisions went on-line on January 1, 2014, “firms with employees who had better than average health risks would typically pay lower premiums, and therefore, they were more likely to be the firms that offer health insurance. As a result, most of people with coverage in the small group market have premium rates that are below average.” CMS polled “several actuarial experts” who believe that 60 to 67 percent of small-group firms enjoyed below-average premiums in the pre-Obamacare market.
Because the remaining firms have above-average premiums, CMS simplistically assumed that 65 percent of these small-group firms will experience increased premiums, and 35 percent will experience decreased premiums. That amounts to 11 million and 6 million people, respectively.
But there are other costly requirements that CMS didn’t directly address. For example, Obamacare includes a silly excise tax on health insurance premiums that will get passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. Same for its taxes on pharmaceuticals and medical devices. The law also requires that all plans cover a broad range of “essential” benefits, some of which they may not already. The law requires that employers cover “adult children” under the age of 26, which is a good deal for those with adult children, but an added cost for everyone else.
These were among the factors that led Delta Air Lines to estimate that it will spend $100 million more on health coverage in 2014 than it did in 2013. And Delta is a large employer, not a small employer; large employers should face relatively lower rate hikes than small ones.
Then, there’s the likelihood that some of the small employers facing steep premium hikes under the law will drop coverage altogether, and rely on Obamacare-subsidized exchanges instead. That form of adverse selection will increase the average cost of small-group health insurance. The companies most likely to do this? Those with a disproportionate number of younger and healthier employees.
One bit of “good” news. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996—known as “HIPAA” by health wonks and the “Patients’ Bill of Rights” by some—required that insurers make offers to anyone in the small-group market regardless of pre-existing conditions. So that part of Obamacare, at least, is redundant in this case, and won’t affect small-group premiums.
Most employers were smart, and renewed their pre-Obamacare policies before the end of 2013. That means that, at the time of renewal, they had twelve more months of premiums under the old system. (Some states banned this practice in order to accelerate the uptake of Obamacare-approved plans.) So we’re going to start seeing more of these stories—of premium spikes in the employer-sponsored market—starting in the second half of 2014, as those old plans roll over.
Total coincidence, but there’s a politically significant event happening in November of 2014.
No matter your reason for embarking upon a business rebranding effort of a company or product name, logo, phrase, design scheme or other such asset, which can be mixed and many, one thing is certain: execute poorly and suffer extreme consequences. There is simply no rebranding effort where the stakes are not extraordinarily high and the margin for error is slim at best. This history has been proven repeatedly amid a litany of rebrand debacles that didn’t heed just a few fundamental principles.
In summary, executing a rebrand must be extraordinarily strategic, not violate the company’s cultural roots, be relevant and consistently supported, and place the customer benefit front and center at all times. It’s all about them.
With more than three decades of management, executive, consulting and speaking experience in markets all over the world, Miller Ingenuity CEO Steve Blue (www.StevenLBlue.com) is a globally regarded business growth authority who has transformed companies into industry giants and enthralled audiences with his dynamic keynotes. In his upcoming book, “Outdo, Outsmart… Outlast: A Practical Guide to Managed, Measured and Meaningful Growth,” he reveals why seeking growth and surviving growth are equally perilous, and require different sets of plans to weather the storms. Follow Steve @MillerIngenuity.
At just 8 years old, Emma Cramer is already changing the world. When she ventured to Fort Wayne and Pennsylvania with her mom to attend BeadforLife events last year, they knew they’d help change lives. What they didn’t know was how much their own lives would change.
Now hundreds of miles traveled and one year later, the dynamic duo has not only raised nearly $5,000 for the organization, they’ve developed a special connection to two Ugandan women who have worked their way out of poverty.
BeadforLife brought Joan Ahimbisibwe and Teddy Namuyiga, two beadmaking graduates and successful entrepreneurs, to the U.S. last spring. Kathy and Emma could not resist experiencing the good of their work firsthand, so they packed up their car and headed to Pittsburgh to meet the women.
“We are honored to support BeadforLife and wear our beads every day,” says Kathy. “Meeting Joan and Teddy and holding their hands made it so real for us. From the moment Teddy grabbed Emma’s hands and said “we will meet again,” Emma’s heart was all in,” she says.
Emma keeps in touch with Teddy and asked for a trip to Africa for her Christmas. While she didn’t receive that gift, she did receive the gift of an email from Teddy in Uganda, her mother said.“Emma just sent another letter for Teddy with a BeadforLife staff member who was traveling to Uganda.” She adds that a trip to Africa is on Emma’s Birthday wishlist.
Here is Teddy watching Emma’s special song in Uganda.
President Museveni’s supporters revel in new anti-gay laws passed despite pressure from US, EU, western donors and rights group. (I WONDER HOW HE FEELS ABOUT BLACK PEOPLE)?
At a public ceremony in a packed room at the State House in Entebbe,Yoweri Museveni formally initialled the anti-homosexuality act, which also outlaws the promotion of homosexuality and requires citizens to denounce to the police anyone suspected of being gay. “No study has shown you can be homosexual by nature. That’s why I have agreed to sign the bill,” Museveni said in a speech at the presidential palace near the capital, Kampala.
If you want to be visible in today’s marketplace, you absolutely must have a presence on social media.
But there are so many from which to choose nowadays! In addition to the biggies like Facebook and Twitter, we have lots of newcomers, including Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr. Additionally, some of the older platforms have undergone major changes in recent months, which affect how effective they are for different functions.
How to know which platforms will best meet your needs?
I asked Alex Hinojosa, our vice president for media operations at EMSI Public Relations, to share some tips for helping you decide.
First, he says, if you plan to handle your social media marketing yourself, try different platforms and use ones with features you enjoy. That will help ensure you stick with it, and may lead you to create inspired content that’s more likely to be shared.
• Facebook: This works best if you’re an individual interacting on a personal level, as opposed to a business. Artists, authors, public speakers and certain other professionals may benefit from having potential customers get to know them on a more personal basis.
A downside to Facebook is that, in an effort to make money for shareholders, it has begun requiring users to pay for the potentially unlimited visibility that used to be free.
• Twitter: Posts are limited to 140 characters – about the length of a headline – and can include a photo or link to a website. This is a great network for getting to know people without sharing a lot of personal information. Plus, you can follow whomever you want, and anyone can follow you.
Twitter is now aggressively cleaning house of “robot” followers – dummy accounts sold for cheap that make it look like the buyer has a huge following. Even if you don’t buy robots, you may end up with some as followers.
“Don’t buy followers and delete any of your followers that don’t appear real. Twitter limits how many followers you can have, so you don’t want to waste them on ‘bots,” Alex says.
• LinkedIn: The social network for professionals is a good place to find and meet people within and outside your industry. People can easily see your credentials and endorse your skills. The background information on your profile page – where you went to school, other companies you’ve been associated with – provides great fodder for finding common ground with strangers and building relationships.
• Google+: The Google search engine favors anything posted on Google+, which is great for SEO. It also combines the best features of Facebook and Twitter, including photo sharing and categorizing content using hashtags (#).
As Alex suggests, if you plan to handle your social media marketing yourself, take into consideration the modes of networking that you enjoy along with the best platforms to meet your needs.
If you have limited experience in social media, jump into the platforms that seem to best align with your goals. You’ll have a learning curve, but a little practice goes a long way. And you’ll soon wonder why you didn’t get more involved a long time ago!
Marsha Friedman is a 24-year veteran of the public relations industry. She is the CEO of EMSI Public Relations (www.emsincorporated.com), a national firm that provides PR strategy and publicity services to businesses, professional firms, entertainers and authors. Marsha is the author of Celebritize Yourself and can also be heard weekly on her Blog Talk Radio Show, The PR Insider. Follow her on Twitter: @marshafriedman.
More and more Americans – 28 percent in 2013 — say they’re not at all confident they’ll have a comfortable retirement.
“A ‘comfortable’ retirement means different things to different people,” notes Haitham “Hutch” Ashoo, co-founder of Pillar Wealth Management, (www.pillarwm.com).
Most retirees and pre-retirees will depend on income from their investments to maintain their desired lifestyle, says Chris Snyder, Pillar’s co-founder. Any dramatic negative market volatility that’s not fully understood can be devastating to their mindset and planning.
1. Have a deep understanding of your retirement life goals.
If you don’t have clear life goals, neither you nor a financial adviser can create a map to get you there, says Ashoo.
2. Do you or your financial adviser have a reliable process for evaluating your progress toward your life goals?
You need to know whether a drop or correction in the market is going to affect your ability to meet your life goals, so you can adjust for that, says Snyder. Simply measuring investment performance is not a reliable means of determining whether a person is on track to meet their life goals.
The analysis produces a score that reflects the level of confidence their clients can have that they will meet their goals. If the score is not between 75 and 90 percent, the advisers consider “what if” scenarios with their clients.
3. Avoid destructive investor behavior.
This destructive behavior can have a devastating impact on their plans in retirement.
are able to achieve your retirement goals with less risk.
4. Once you’ve accomplished 1, 2 and 3, let your financial professionals do the work.
It may be hard to turn a deaf ear when friends or family insist you should act or react because of something they’ve read or heard in the news, or because of an experience they’ve had. Let your professionals guide you, Ashoo says.
everything that is near and dear to their hearts,” he says.
Haitham “Hutch” Ashoo and Chris Snyder are co-founders of Pillar Wealth Management, (www.pillarwm.com), of Walnut Creek, Calif. The two specialize in customized wealth management advice to affluent families. The service is provided to a limited number of clients. New clients are accepted only when Pillar has determined it can add substantial value to their financial lives. Ashoo and Snyder’s unique five-step consultative process for new clients ensures they have a deep understanding of clients’ goals. The two have a combined 51 years of experience. They are the authors of numerous published works, have addressed thousands of investors nationwide, and have been interviewed on radio shows across the country.