Inside Armslist: the online gun show that never ends
Thomas Caldwell was a veteran in his 60s with a soft physique, oval glasses, no income, and a history of mental illness. “I’ve been schizophrenic all my life, hearing voices,” he once said in a courtroom. He didn’t have a license to sell firearms, but that hadn’t stopped him. In 2015, according to prosecutors, police found a Glock in a Milwaukee drug house and quickly linked it to him. He’d purchased it only the day before.
Months later, an agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) confronted Caldwell about the pistol. According to the ATF, he said he had been purchasing guns from a licensed dealer, then reselling many of them through
Armslist.com, a website that connects sellers with buyers looking for anything from a pistol to an AR-15.
If Caldwell wanted to sell guns, the ATF warned him, there was a proper way to do it. Without obtaining a federal firearms license, he was breaking the law and potentially putting weapons into the hands of criminals.
Caldwell didn’t listen, and he managed to turn flipping guns into a substantial business, prosecutors later said. Between December 2015 and May 2018, he made cash deposits into his bank account totaling more than $19,000, all from gun sales. Even after his initial run-in with authorities, he kept up the practice for years. In 2017, Madison police found a Taurus 9mm pistol during an investigation, then traced it back to a purchase Caldwell had made two weeks before.
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https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/16/21067793/guns-online-armslist-marketplace-craigslist-sales-buy-crime-investigation