One post showed the man walking through a home brandishing a gun with a high-capacity magazine and tapping an unidentified woman on her buttocks with the barrel. In another, he waved a pistol loaded with a 50-round drum magazine in the air while driving a car.

They’re two of several Snapchat posts by Anthony Reed, a 22-year-old Nevada resident who prosecutors allege used the social media platform to market weapons in California.

Arms traffickers have long used the internet to connect with potential buyers, and there have been growing reports of weapons dealers across the US using platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to market their guns. Several recent law enforcement investigations show that in California’s Bay Area, social media is playing a significant role in the sale of firearms outlawed in the state.

‘Flooding the community with guns’

Federal agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) learned of Anthony Reed’s trafficking ring in January 2018. According to federal prosecutors, Reed, who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, his roommate Rahsaan Faison, and Faison’s brother Julaan purchased potentially hundreds of semi-automatic pistols through private-party transactions in Nevada. Nevada doesn’t require background checks or record-keeping for private-party gun sales, in effect hiding these transfers from authorities and allowing purchasers to acquire large numbers of guns in short periods of time without setting off alarms.

The trio smuggled these guns into the city of Oakland and stored them at the homes of two friends. Reed then marketed the weapons to potential customers through various Snapchat accounts.

Reed’s ads were effective in attracting numerous customers. One was an undercover ATF agent who contacted Reed and his alleged co-conspirators through Snapchat.

From January to November, the undercover agent set up at least nine deals with Reed and the Faison brothers, paying more than $30,000 for 35 handguns. The weapons included multiple Glock 9mm and .40 caliber pistols and several “assault pistols”, including a Zastava AK-style pistol with a 30-round magazine, which is banned in California. During one deal, the Faisons told the agent: “You put in the order and we can get you whatever you’re looking for.”

Over the course of the year-long investigation, federal prosecutors wrote in court documents, Reed “constantly posted videos and photos of firearms to his Snapchat account”. Overall, prosecutors and ATF agents suspect, the gun trafficking ring sold well over 100 firearms in the Bay Area. Many customers were people with felony conviction records prohibiting them from possessing a gun. Some weapons were used to commit armed robberies, assaults, and murders. Many of them were never recovered.

“Mr Reed has been effectively flooding the community with guns over the past few months,” the assistant US attorney Samantha Schott told a judge during a December hearing.

A persistent problem

In some ways, the sale of illegal guns through social media is just a new twist on an old and vexing problem for California authorities.

California has some of the strictest gun laws in the United States, including a ban on high-capacity magazines and assault rifles, but neighboring states allow for the sale and possession of much deadlier firearms. For decades, Arizona and Nevada, only half a day’s drive from California’s urban centers, have been a major source of guns used in California crimes, including indiscriminate mass shootings.

People attend a vigil for victims of the mass shooting at the Gilroy garlic festival. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Authorities believe that the man suspected of killing three and wounding 12 in last month’s deadly mass shooting in Gilroy, California, for example, legally purchased an AK-47-style rifle in Nevada, where he lived, and transported the gun across state lines.

The Gilroy shooter acted alone, but dedicated traffickers have for decades used similar schemes to get guns into California, and the death toll attributable to these weapons is significant.

“California has been surrounded on most sides by states with much, much weaker gun safety laws,” says Ari Freilich, a staff attorney with the Giffords Law Center. “Predictably, those states have become magnets for gun traffickers funneling guns into California, especially when traffickers can easily acquire bulk quantities of firearms, including assault weapons, without a background check or sale record in Arizona and Nevada today.”

The Bay Area’s illegal gun trafficking problem has actually gotten worse in recent years, according to the Alameda county sheriff’s sergeant Ray Kelly. “We are seizing more guns than many of us in law enforcement have seen in the past two decades,” says Kelly. A major concern, Kelly adds, is “straw purchasing”, in which traffickers use third parties with clean criminal records to buy guns legitimately in Nevada before illegally transferring them to California. “It’s very easy to drive to and from Nevada with a car full of straw-purchased guns and parts.”

In 2017, federal prosecutors charged two Oakland men, Edgar De La Cruz and Andrew Winn, with leading a gun trafficking network that put firearms in the hands of alleged murderers and felons. The pair coordinated with Ricky Straight, a Reno, Nevada, resident who recruited multiple straw purchasers to buy firearms from Reno-area gun stores. Straight helped move more than 39 guns to Oakland, where De La Cruz and Winn sold them on the streets. As of 2017, police had already recovered 16 of their guns. Four were taken from homicide suspects, three guns were associated with attempted homicides, two were used by armed robbery suspects, and two were in possession of men with domestic violence convictions. Dozens of other guns smuggled by De La Cruz and Winn into the Bay Area remain unaccounted for.

In this selfie, Ricky Straight poses with an AR-style pistol, a type of weapon that is prohibited in California. Photograph: US attorneys office

Anthony Reed signed a sealed plea agreement and Rahsaan Faison pleaded guilty to firearms trafficking. Alexandria Corneiro, an ATF public information officer, told the Guardian over email that ATF could not provide more information about the gun trafficking ring allegedly led by Reed, as the agency’s investigation was ongoing. Many gun trafficking cases are sealed for months while authorities track down and arrest suspects and pursue new leads.

Increasingly, leads come in the form of social media posts by gun traffickers and their customers.

The role of social media

Snapchat prohibits advertising firearms, but according to authorities, the platform has been used by several gun traffickers. A 31-year-old a man was arrested last year for allegedly smuggling guns along the “Iron Pipeline” from Georgia, where firearms laws are relatively lax, to Connecticut, and advertising the weapons on Snapchat. A 17-year-old New Mexico resident was arrested by the FBI in June for allegedly selling firearms, including assault rifles, through a Snapchat account.

In response to questions about how it handles gun sales, a spokesperson for Snapchat provided its general company policies regarding prohibited content.

Snapchat isn’t the only platform on law enforcement’s radar. Gun sellers have connected with clients on Facebook’s Marketplace, even though the secondhand forum technically forbids gun sales. And some of traffickers have turned to Instagram to post firearms ads and negotiate at least some deals.

According to unsealed court records in another recent Bay Area case, Daniel James, an Oakland resident, ran a “gun and drug-trafficking network” on a suburban street of single-family homes in East Oakland. ATF agents learned about the gun sales after they contacted a person who had posted pictures of firearms on an Instagram account. This person began working as a confidential informant for the ATF and allegedly bought 34 guns from James and 12 men who worked for him. These included AR-15 rifles, AR-style pistols, several fully-automatic handguns, and high-capacity magazines, all of which are illegal in California.

ATF and Oakland police declined to provide more information about the alleged gun trafficking network led by James, because the case is ongoing. But Whitney Hameth, an ATF agent, described the scale of the investigation in a search warrant affidavit. Agents intercepted phone calls and text messages and used GPS location information to follow suspects. They placed hidden pole cameras outside of homes and businesses to record gun sales. And they closely monitored suspects’ social media accounts, including Instagram, where pictures of firearms were repeatedly posted, and some sales were negotiated.

“Persons involved in gun and drug trafficking communicate with their associates, suppliers and customers using cellphones, smartphone apps, and online messaging functions through websites like Facebook and Instagram,” Hameth wrote in the warrant application. “They uses these methods to arrange the sales of guns and drugs, set quantities and prices, meeting places.”

On 10 January, federal agents and the Oakland police raided multiple houses and arrested participants of the gun trafficking network. At a press conference later that day, Oakland’s police chief, Anne Kirkpatrick, said police seized more than 50 guns during the raids.

“In this particular operation,” said Kirkpatrick, “we have already linked several of these guns to murders and shootings in our city.”

Instagram did not make anyone available for this story to talk about how the company handles firearms trafficking on its platform. But the company, which is owned by Facebook, prohibits the purchase, sale, gifting, exchange, and transfer of firearms, firearms parts, and ammunition between private individuals.

Freilich said much more could be done to reduce the flow of illegal firearms into California, including restricting bulk firearms purchases and requiring gun dealers in Nevada and Arizona to share sales records with California law enforcement.

Recently passed gun regulations in Nevada, including a new requirement that private party gun sales will have to be carried out through a federally licensed dealer with a background check, are a positive sign but may not be enough, he added.

“Arizona may become an even more significant source of arms for gun traffickers, since that state continues to place next to zero restrictions on people’s ability to immediately acquire unlimited quantities of firearms, including assault weapons, without a background check, ID, or sale record, no questions asked.”



