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This afternoon, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced an agreement with Facebook to monitor and eliminate illegal gun sales on its sites, calling it “the strongest step ever taken to end illegal sales of firearms on social media sites.” Facebook and its photo-sharing platform, Instagram, are not e-commerce sites, but they have been called out in recent months for hosting pages that boast background check-free gun sales across state lines to minors, felons and those with mental disabilities.

While Facebook plans to delete posts from vendors who aim to evade the law, it will depend largely on organizations such as Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America—which began on Facebook right after the Sandy Hook massacre and successfully persuaded Starbucks to change the gun policy in its stores—and Mayors Against Illegal Guns to report such sites.

“It’s in no one’s interests for these sites to become black market sites,” John Feinblatt, chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, said. The attorney general and the aforementioned advocacy groups will have a direct line to Facebook, which also plans to educate users about existing gun regulations. Users can also report groups that promote illegal gun sales, though reporting of inappropriate pages has had mixed results in the past. Facebook has never allowed guns or ammunition to be advertised on its network, and that prohibition will continue.

“Nothing about this interferes with anyone’s ability to conduct legitimate commerce online,” Schneiderman emphasized, and pointed to his success in closing the gun-show loophole in New York by working with the state’s gun-show operators, who voluntarily signed on to mandatory background checks. The Brady Campaign said the new regulations still make it too easy for dangerous people to acquire guns.

Here is today's report (25 incidents, 10 fatalities)

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/05/the-gun-report-march-5-2014/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0#more-8212