In the case of both Instagram and Reddit, sellers post public listings for their guns [like these], and the transactions are completed elsewhere. In many cases, Mother Jones notes, Reddit gun sellers do use a licensed dealer to complete the transaction and run a background check. Some sellers are themselves federally-licensed to sell guns. The GunsForSale subreddit allows users to verify the completion of gun purchases through the marketplace. According to those verifications, the subreddit arranged 159 verified sales in the past six months. But based on the number of listings — over 1,000 for that same period of time — Mother Jones and others believe that not all transactions are verified on the site, especially those completed face-to-face in states with particularly lax laws governing "private" sales. According to the subreddit's FAQ page, sellers can prefer to do "face-to-face" (i.e. no background check) sales for out-of-state buyers.

There's another question raised by Mother Jones's look at the subreddit: Are licensed gun sellers using the site to (sometimes illegally) arrange for sales without conducting a background check? Because of the way Reddit works — it's very serious about protecting the privacy of its users — that question is very difficult to answer. But Mother Jones found at least one licensed dealer — FirearmConcierge — who said on a now-deleted Reddit thread that he "ha[s] been known not to do a background check on some transactions." In general, a licensed dealer can legally sell guns from his or her personal collection without a background check, but can't do it for anything from a business inventory.

So what about the Reddit-branded guns? This is the part of the story that makes Reddit stand out from the other social networks serving as makeshift marketplaces. It's pretty clear that the law is on the side of Reddit's gun selling subreddit overall, even if some of the users push the boundaries. But Reddit's corporate stance on its use as a staging ground for firearms purchases is a different question. You can't buy a Twitter AR-15, nor can you purchase an Instagram firearm. The Reddit-engraved firearms became a big story months ago, but no one seemed to know the company's exact feelings on the use of its logo. Mother Jones now says that when Condé Nast owned Reddit, the company approved the use of the logo, as long as the firearms included some engraved gun safety language, too.

Although Reddit has stopped short of defending the product itself, the approval arguably reads as an endorsement of the site's gun sellers — and possibly the community's own popular pro-gun forums as a whole. That's unsettled those Reddit users who don't want the site to serve as a marketplace for background check-free gun purchases, who've been tracking the saga of the Reddit-logo firearms for months.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.