There is a part of me that has the knee jerk "Amazon are terrible" reaction. But another part is this is just shining a light on goods that were sold anyway, but we could not find them in the shadows.
So I have a theory on Twitter - it's not that Twitter causes people to spout offensive rants and bully people - it's that it simply takes every pub and street conversation that happened anyway and makes them publically available.
(yes there is an effect of reinforcement that the pub conversation would not get so it's not perfect analogy)
Amazon is similar - they are trying to become the marketplace for everything sold in the world - which will include the crap, the counterfeit and the simply useless.
It kind of is Amazons problem, but like Twitter and Facebook, they are not causing it, and it won't go away if we stop Amazon somehow.
It's us and our societies.
Edit: there is a secondary effect here (linked to Google as well) that is no-one would buy from "some random dude selling pills on a street corner" but Amazons big tent lends him some
of Amazons credibility.
Thirdly we often moan here on HN that Google just returns mainstream results and we cannot find the out of the way stuff - but in these cases that's exactly what we want.
So I am not sure if this is an Amazon search problem (don't return counterfeit products - cost bourne by Amazon) or of it is an enforcement problem (police arrest counterfeiters - cost bourne by taxpayer) or something else like only buy from reputable providers (cost bourne by purchasers)
Just because counterfeit goods are sold doesn’t mean you have to sell them too.
With all of these stories about Amazon it’s clear they care more about volume of goods sold and therefore amount of revenue generated and market share than they do about what is being sold.
If two journalists and a few days can turn up this many clearly banned items that Amazon’s searches themselves are suggesting, it clearly is not something that the company hasn’t been aware of since the start of third party selling. They just choose not to commit resources to it as they’re facing no serious repercussions for it and it actually makes them money.
Since this is nominally a site that discusses technology and Amazon is itself a major vendor of internet services it is not out of the question to think that they could, with programmers assigned to it and a desire to do so, massively reduce the ability for dangerous and/or banned items being sold on their site. Given that many of these things come from the same sellers and are being purchased by the same people it’s not as if these are all one off outliers. It’s a hard problem, certainly, but this is a company led by the richest man in the world for crying out loud!
If ever there was a reason for state oversight to stop large tech entities from getting away with whatever they want, surely it’s enabling people to actually cause deaths?
> takes every pub and street conversation that happened anyway
... and hugely amplifies them, giving them an audience of potentially millions instead of a couple of people chatting together.
Aside from that, all this offensive ranting and bullying, as well as every other type of conversation, is now saved and ready to be mined for advertising or political gain. Advertising is annoying but can be lived with, it's the political data-mining companies that are a real problem. See, for example, Cambridge Analytica.
Arguably, without these shady political entities and their data mining capabilities, and the amplifying power of Twitter and Facebook, we might not be faced with Brexit and Trump.
Or maybe we would, but at the very least we need to consider this and can't just say, sure, nothing has changed really. Because things have changed, and are continuing to change, rapidly and in ways we cannot predict, due to the sudden central role of tech giants in our societies.
the real audience for twitter is the news media who magnifies its exposure granting it more relevance than it deserves. the organizations that know how to exploit this are very good at intimidating others through direct accusation or insinuation. This can include people who simply don't agree with a point or view or are not vocal enough in their agreement.
Joseph McCarthy has been resurrected but now by the mob.
It’s clear from the article keeping the marketplace clean is not a company wide priority. Amazon famously has very decoupled teams so they have a team setup for this that filters incoming listings, and that is it. After all many of these banned items don’t really harm the user “just” society at large, so it’s not very “customer obsessed” to spend a big effort cross company to stamp them out. It would not surprise me if every flaw this article pointed out was known, and the isolated team simply does not have the people and politics power to fix it.
You can see this because the teams which manage virtually every other part of the site are not involved - the search recommendation was suggesting banned items - the buy together team does not use it’s system to find banned products related to removed items - the amazons choice team does not apply extra diligence to the things it flags. All things that a postmortem on now people find banned items would come up as action items. I bet they probably have, but it was low priory on those teams backlog.
It’s also clear they have not funded a big enough secret shopper team to just act like a user and try and buy banned products and then make reports to various teams across the site where they have gaps. If an outsider can sit down with your system and find bugs after a little bit of time, you don’t have a decent quality process in place.
Anything else isn't a real issue. While accidentally rejecting even 0.1% of the legit listings surely would cause heads to roll for screwing with the bottom line.
Yes, such idea is absurd. I can't fathom along what lines they came to the idea of online marketplaces being the ones to blame, or moreover being burdened by the duty to police their markets... The line of thinking of such people is not unlike the ones of communist party.
Found one stall in a giant market selling weed? Ban all sellers. Had one illegal BnB in an apartment building? Expunge all renters in the whole apartment block.
Not great examples compared to amazon considering amazon is not just renting space to the seller, but also actually sells the illegal merchandise by taking payment and shipping it.
It’s more akin to finding it on the shelf at walmart than a stall in a market, or more akin to making your payment for the illegal BnB directly to the landlord’s office.
“ Alongside its third-party marketplace, Amazon sells products to consumers directly, and The Markup found it was also selling banned items itself, revealing cracks in the largely automated purchasing system that feeds its massive product catalog.”
> Found one stall in a giant market selling weed? Ban all sellers.
No one is suggesting this. It’s more like if you find one stall selling weed and then five hundred other stalls selling various illegal things, and then you go to the market manager and tell them and they lazily remove one or two vendors but don’t or any actual resources to work to root out the problem.
It’s more like: a market says we won’t have anyone selling weed, and there are stalls selling weed, and someone says “hey, you’re selling weed even though you say you won’t”
And unlike a market, which is generally not owned by a single entity, this market is owned by the richest person in the world, so it certainly has the resources to enforce its policies.
I found it funny the article considered an ar15 vise as a prohibited part when it specifically is not. Amazon bans parts that directly attach to some weapons (and only some of them, not scopes or lights) and a vise block does not attach.
I suppose we could go the opposite way and declare Amazon should not sell any punch, hammer or gauge...
Huh, you are right, they do specifically call out Vise blocks, though they also specify AR-15/M16 vise blocks. I wonder if it's possible to just add an AK trunnion pattern to it and still list it, since it's no longer AR-15/M16 specific...
It's a bit of a stretch to me that the picture up top is trying to pin the heartfelt death of a father on Amazon when all Amazon did was sell a pill press...
I'm not saying Amazon should be selling these things, but that choice makes me distrust this whole article.
Corporate lawyers often say “no policy at all is better than a policy you don’t enforce or follow.” Amazon set a policy not to sell or facilitate the sale of that type of product and then didn’t follow/enforce it. Failing a test of your own design is failing to meet a preposterously low bar.
The question to ask is whether Amazon’s policy and corresponding procedures are reasonably designed and effectively implemented to prevent violations. Will a few things slip through the cracks of a reasonably designed and effectively implemented compliance program? Of course. But a reasonably designed and effectively implemented compliance program will iterate and improve each time something is identified that has “slipped through.” Over time compliance increases while the number of cracks decrease.
Is Amazon’s approach to this policy reasonable and effective given the resources at the company’s disposal? Amazon is a tech behemoth. Surely they could spare a developer or two to come up with a more effective and automated way to monitor for banned items. A process that looks for keywords wouldn’t be hard, especially given how Amazon’s retail system works. Or maybe a system that identifies product listing photos that are similar shape/size to banned items. Amazon has some experience with image recognition and machine learning that would make that much easier to implement compared to most online retailers that allow third-party listings.
Amazon is more than capable of designing and implementing procedures to achieve much more robust compliance with their policy without expending considerably more effort. The only reason they don’t is because they don’t want to - because it hurts their bottom line and (for now) failing to reasonably and effectively implement their policy costs them only the occasional PR ding.
As an Amazon customer I'm fine with them dedicating the legal minimum effort to this. Prices going up or the service getting worse over having to dedicate more resources to banned items would be a loss for me.
Is it a bit of a stretch to hold Amazon responsible when counterfeit medicines, made with Amazon-sold equipment, harm people? The sole purpose of this equipment is to deceive.
As for woman in the picture up top, I think she has a reason to complain:
She woke up in a hospital bed herself. She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.
Certainly not. Of course, people who abuse drugs don't deserve to die, but there is some risk you have to assume.
The people actually manufacturing the fake drugs have a lot more liability than the sale of pill presses, which have legitimate uses.
> She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.
This whole family shares each others pills?! W-T-F!
How did the counterfeit medicines get to the people who took them? These are prescription drugs; even if someone made counterfeits of them, how are they going to get the counterfeits into the prescription drug supply chain? It's not like you can get prescription drugs on Amazon.
I don't see anything about this anywhere in the article.
To be fair, Percocet isn't exactly "safe" and it's never prescribed to "help people relax". Overdoses on non-counterfeit prescription opioids happen all the time -- Often in this exact scenario, where a (presumably) opioid-naive person takes a "normal dose" of an opioid-tolerant person like a hospice patient or an addict.
Also, taking the drugs left by someone who died of an of an overdose is best done with extreme caution, or not at all.
In assigning blame, it's also worth remembering that tablet presses are also used for compounding legal vitamins, making packaging cleaners and reagents ("dissolve one tablet of cleaner in a liter of water") and so forth.
Yes, I think it's still a stretch. Something along the lines of the guns don't kill people, people kill people argument.
I'm not saying that Amazon wasn't at fault here, but if you just read the headline and looked at the picture you might think Amazon was the one selling the counterfeit pills.
The bulk of the article is about a guy who mixed fentanyl with xanax and passed it off as percocet, but yet the bad actor is supposed to be Amazon? The real meta-villain here is the war on drug users, which created a profit motive for doing something so maliciously stupid. And it's rooted in this same regressive idea of controlling what people can buy to solve society's problems.
I personally enjoy being able to obtain "weird shit" of all varieties. I don't know what's involved in a pill press per se, but I can't imagine it's particularly complex or tough to improvise. Distributed 3d printing/milling culture can't come quick enough, and get us some refuge from this clueless fear of tools.
I'm kinda shocked that the State hasn't already banned 3D printers and desktop CNC mills. I mean... you can make almost anything ^^GASP^^ ... OMG, the horror, won't somebody please think of the children???
It really is absurd how so many people want to continue with this ridiculous war on inanimate objects, when the problem is almost always people.
Ending the WOD will move us from having organized crime producing drugs to sleazy outfits trying to get rich quick. I don't want to understate what a massive improvement it will be because you'll be buying from someone afraid of going to jail, but it's not like Bayer is going to start selling heroin again. You'll still often be buying drugs from people who are maliciously stupid.
As far as I know, the marijuana rush hasn't created a trend of middlemen cutting weed with oregano and then making up for it with a little fentanyl.
Sleazy doesn't imply deceitful. Black markets set a tone of little enforcement and no recourse, since participants are already criminals. This encourages negative-sum games.
ibogaineclinic.com or search YouTube for ibogaine by David Dardashti. He is a global pioneer in using pure ibogaine which is an isolated HCL from Iboga root bark. He had a video talking about the street pressed drugs. he treated a patient who was on street pressed oxys.
This is awesome, I just wish they were worse at enforcing some other prohibitions.
I’ve been trying to get my hands on a real kinder egg (not the kinder joy bullshit) for a while now. I thought the kinder joy and a wonder ball would be enough, but it is not.
I don’t know why German kids are so much more resilient against choking than American kids, but whatever. (I actually do know, it’s because of an ancient law that should have been updated by now)
Same with the Armenian and Russian stores in SoCal. However I think it's a rather recent phenomenon. I remember 20 years ago neither Kinder Surprise nor Kinder Joy were available anywhere, then about 10-15 years ago Kinder Joy became widespread and shortly after Kinder Surprise was available. I don't think any of the grocery stores cared about the ban but it wasn't until Kinder Joy reminded (immigrant) consumers of the eggs from their childhood that the demand became obvious to the shop owners.
No one said those things are illegal to possess or sell.
They're saying Amazon prohibits their sale, but doesn't effectively enforce that rule.
> They’re included among 38 pages of third-party seller rules and prohibitions for its U.S. marketplace.
> Yet an investigation by The Markup found that Amazon fails to properly enforce that list, allowing third-party sellers to put up and sell banned items.
I never said they were. (Although they may be in some places.) What I'm saying is it's very useful to have tools to get into a locked car or to pick a lock. Who hasn't locked himself out?
We don't know how effective their enforcement of the rules are. Maybe 99.9% of listings for banned items are properly removed and what we see are just 0.1% of a very large number. I would say 99.9% is a rate that most people would say is effective. Would you say the rule enforcement is effective if it catches exactly 100% of violators?
Wow. I knew that Amazon banned firearm sales (makes me sad), but they have some stupid arbitrary rules.
Prohibited: Single point, 3-point, tactical, and quick detach slings
Why? seems like slings can be used for many things.
Permitted: Fixed stocks, with the exception of thumbhole stocks
Prohibited: Any non-fixed stock, including telescoping, folding or collapsible stocks
Someone please tell me why non-fixed stock are so horrible?
Permitted: Magazine floor plates/base plates
I'm actually surprised by this one.
Prohibited: Full auto sears (also known as drop-in auto sear or DIAS)
Haha. Amazon would be the least of your problems if you sell one of these. They should also probably stop selling metal coat hangers.[1]
Prohibited: AR-15/M16 armorer’s wrenches or combo wrenches
Really? So I cannot by a castle wrench if it's marketed as for AR-15s?
Prohibited: Magazine loaders, except for those that can accommodate the following calibers: .223/5.56; 7.62x51; 308; 7.62x39; 5.45x39
Okay but .300 AAC, 6.5, 30-06, .338, .50 BMG/Beowulf are fine.
So much irrational hate for the AR-15 platform. It should be right up HNs alley as it is a fully customizable and reparable platform unencumbered by patents.
There are many items that are permitted but subject to geographic restrictions such as airsoft guns.[1]
Aside from actual serialized firearms, ammunition, magazines, and some triggers in some state, pretty much every state has no restrictions on firearm accessories such as stocks, grips, slings, sights, and even barrels.
I don't know why you're worried about sears because either they are unregistered and illegal or registered and covered under the firearm sale ban. Adjustable stocks are arguably a concern because they make building rifles shorter than 26 inches easier. I'm not going to comment on anything else and I'm not pushing any specific agenda with this post, but those were my initial thoughts about those items.
> I don't know why you're worried about sears because either they are unregistered and illegal or registered and covered under the firearm sale ban.
Exactly.
> Adjustable stocks are arguably a concern because they make building rifles shorter than 26 inches easier.
You could just not put stock on. An AR-15 with a 16in barrel is 30in with the stock collapsed and cannot be much shorter without the stock because of the buffer tube.
>An AR-15 with a 16in barrel is 30in with the stock collapsed and cannot be much shorter without the stock because of the buffer tube.
Telescoping stocks maybe not (my inexperience showing there) but folding stocks definitely can take it under 30 inches then. I assume you're saying a normal caliber ar15 won't be very fireable without a buffer tube. Anyways, apparently folding and telescoping stocks are also illegal in California, which might be the real reason amazon has these rules.
While there are technically stocks you can get for an AR-15 that fold, because you have to also fold the buffer tube they are not recommend and potentially unreliable. It is completely inoperable without the buffer tube.
They are not illegal to own in California. They are only illegal to be on a semi-automatic center fire rifle with a detachable magazine. So if you mag lock your AR with something like this[1] you can put a telescoping stock on it. This is also legal[2] (with a 10rd magazine) since it is not a center fire rifle.
Again a stock is not integral to the operation of most rifles so you can just not put one on. Oh course then it's legally not considered a rifle most of the time.
Moreover, having a rifle shorter than 26in is also a federal crime. You might as well go all the way and saw the barrel in half too if you really want a SBR.
I'm familiar with mag locking and all of the "featureless" difficulties, I was just being brief. However I understand center fire refers to the cartridge/primer configuration and I'm not really sure why that matters, could I trouble you to explain? WRT the buffer tube, I understand that you need the buffer to move the bcg, correct?
Sure. It matters, I'm guessing because the design prohibits larger calibers due to the physics of how it works.
>Rimfire ammo is limited to smaller calibers since the cartridge walls need to be thin enough to be able to be crushed by the firing pin and ignite the primer.
> The downside?
> Well, the nature of the casing means it’s pretty much limited to small calibers. You have to have some relatively flimsy brass to handle the rimfire set up. As a result, the powder necessary to propel a larger bullet would blow the brass apart.[1]
Correct about the buffer tube. So even if you installed a folding stock on an AR-15, it require some proprietary buffer tube to work like this one.[2]
> Prohibited: Single point, 3-point, tactical, and quick detach slings
Funny, I just received a VTAC sling from Amazon. I wonder if I was able to buy it due to the "enforcement failures" mentioned in the article or if it's because it is a 2-point sling (obviously much safer than a single point or 3-point sling which are basically weapons of mass destruction).
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadSo I have a theory on Twitter - it's not that Twitter causes people to spout offensive rants and bully people - it's that it simply takes every pub and street conversation that happened anyway and makes them publically available.
(yes there is an effect of reinforcement that the pub conversation would not get so it's not perfect analogy)
Amazon is similar - they are trying to become the marketplace for everything sold in the world - which will include the crap, the counterfeit and the simply useless.
It kind of is Amazons problem, but like Twitter and Facebook, they are not causing it, and it won't go away if we stop Amazon somehow.
It's us and our societies.
Edit: there is a secondary effect here (linked to Google as well) that is no-one would buy from "some random dude selling pills on a street corner" but Amazons big tent lends him some of Amazons credibility.
Thirdly we often moan here on HN that Google just returns mainstream results and we cannot find the out of the way stuff - but in these cases that's exactly what we want.
So I am not sure if this is an Amazon search problem (don't return counterfeit products - cost bourne by Amazon) or of it is an enforcement problem (police arrest counterfeiters - cost bourne by taxpayer) or something else like only buy from reputable providers (cost bourne by purchasers)
Since this is nominally a site that discusses technology and Amazon is itself a major vendor of internet services it is not out of the question to think that they could, with programmers assigned to it and a desire to do so, massively reduce the ability for dangerous and/or banned items being sold on their site. Given that many of these things come from the same sellers and are being purchased by the same people it’s not as if these are all one off outliers. It’s a hard problem, certainly, but this is a company led by the richest man in the world for crying out loud!
If ever there was a reason for state oversight to stop large tech entities from getting away with whatever they want, surely it’s enabling people to actually cause deaths?
... and hugely amplifies them, giving them an audience of potentially millions instead of a couple of people chatting together.
Aside from that, all this offensive ranting and bullying, as well as every other type of conversation, is now saved and ready to be mined for advertising or political gain. Advertising is annoying but can be lived with, it's the political data-mining companies that are a real problem. See, for example, Cambridge Analytica.
Arguably, without these shady political entities and their data mining capabilities, and the amplifying power of Twitter and Facebook, we might not be faced with Brexit and Trump.
Or maybe we would, but at the very least we need to consider this and can't just say, sure, nothing has changed really. Because things have changed, and are continuing to change, rapidly and in ways we cannot predict, due to the sudden central role of tech giants in our societies.
Joseph McCarthy has been resurrected but now by the mob.
You can see this because the teams which manage virtually every other part of the site are not involved - the search recommendation was suggesting banned items - the buy together team does not use it’s system to find banned products related to removed items - the amazons choice team does not apply extra diligence to the things it flags. All things that a postmortem on now people find banned items would come up as action items. I bet they probably have, but it was low priory on those teams backlog.
It’s also clear they have not funded a big enough secret shopper team to just act like a user and try and buy banned products and then make reports to various teams across the site where they have gaps. If an outsider can sit down with your system and find bugs after a little bit of time, you don’t have a decent quality process in place.
Anything else isn't a real issue. While accidentally rejecting even 0.1% of the legit listings surely would cause heads to roll for screwing with the bottom line.
If someone wants a $4000 pill press they’re going to get it anyway. The idea that somehow this will prevent harm is absurd.
Found one stall in a giant market selling weed? Ban all sellers. Had one illegal BnB in an apartment building? Expunge all renters in the whole apartment block.
It’s more akin to finding it on the shelf at walmart than a stall in a market, or more akin to making your payment for the illegal BnB directly to the landlord’s office.
“ Alongside its third-party marketplace, Amazon sells products to consumers directly, and The Markup found it was also selling banned items itself, revealing cracks in the largely automated purchasing system that feeds its massive product catalog.”
No one is suggesting this. It’s more like if you find one stall selling weed and then five hundred other stalls selling various illegal things, and then you go to the market manager and tell them and they lazily remove one or two vendors but don’t or any actual resources to work to root out the problem.
And unlike a market, which is generally not owned by a single entity, this market is owned by the richest person in the world, so it certainly has the resources to enforce its policies.
I suppose we could go the opposite way and declare Amazon should not sell any punch, hammer or gauge...
So a top level reading would indicate they don't allow ak47 vise blocks either.
pistol grip + collapsing stock? assault weapon!
pistol grip + a2 fixed stock? not an assault weapon?
I'm not saying Amazon should be selling these things, but that choice makes me distrust this whole article.
Is Amazon’s approach to this policy reasonable and effective given the resources at the company’s disposal? Amazon is a tech behemoth. Surely they could spare a developer or two to come up with a more effective and automated way to monitor for banned items. A process that looks for keywords wouldn’t be hard, especially given how Amazon’s retail system works. Or maybe a system that identifies product listing photos that are similar shape/size to banned items. Amazon has some experience with image recognition and machine learning that would make that much easier to implement compared to most online retailers that allow third-party listings.
Amazon is more than capable of designing and implementing procedures to achieve much more robust compliance with their policy without expending considerably more effort. The only reason they don’t is because they don’t want to - because it hurts their bottom line and (for now) failing to reasonably and effectively implement their policy costs them only the occasional PR ding.
As for woman in the picture up top, I think she has a reason to complain:
She woke up in a hospital bed herself. She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.
The people actually manufacturing the fake drugs have a lot more liability than the sale of pill presses, which have legitimate uses.
> She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.
This whole family shares each others pills?! W-T-F!
I don't see anything about this anywhere in the article.
Also, taking the drugs left by someone who died of an of an overdose is best done with extreme caution, or not at all.
In assigning blame, it's also worth remembering that tablet presses are also used for compounding legal vitamins, making packaging cleaners and reagents ("dissolve one tablet of cleaner in a liter of water") and so forth.
I'm not saying that Amazon wasn't at fault here, but if you just read the headline and looked at the picture you might think Amazon was the one selling the counterfeit pills.
I personally enjoy being able to obtain "weird shit" of all varieties. I don't know what's involved in a pill press per se, but I can't imagine it's particularly complex or tough to improvise. Distributed 3d printing/milling culture can't come quick enough, and get us some refuge from this clueless fear of tools.
It really is absurd how so many people want to continue with this ridiculous war on inanimate objects, when the problem is almost always people.
Sleazy doesn't imply deceitful. Black markets set a tone of little enforcement and no recourse, since participants are already criminals. This encourages negative-sum games.
I’ve been trying to get my hands on a real kinder egg (not the kinder joy bullshit) for a while now. I thought the kinder joy and a wonder ball would be enough, but it is not.
I don’t know why German kids are so much more resilient against choking than American kids, but whatever. (I actually do know, it’s because of an ancient law that should have been updated by now)
I've got a closet full of this stuff. And I never used them to commit a crime.
They're saying Amazon prohibits their sale, but doesn't effectively enforce that rule.
> They’re included among 38 pages of third-party seller rules and prohibitions for its U.S. marketplace.
> Yet an investigation by The Markup found that Amazon fails to properly enforce that list, allowing third-party sellers to put up and sell banned items.
We don't know how effective their enforcement of the rules are. Maybe 99.9% of listings for banned items are properly removed and what we see are just 0.1% of a very large number. I would say 99.9% is a rate that most people would say is effective. Would you say the rule enforcement is effective if it catches exactly 100% of violators?
Prohibited: Single point, 3-point, tactical, and quick detach slings
Why? seems like slings can be used for many things.
Permitted: Fixed stocks, with the exception of thumbhole stocks
Prohibited: Any non-fixed stock, including telescoping, folding or collapsible stocks
Someone please tell me why non-fixed stock are so horrible?
Permitted: Magazine floor plates/base plates
I'm actually surprised by this one.
Prohibited: Full auto sears (also known as drop-in auto sear or DIAS)
Haha. Amazon would be the least of your problems if you sell one of these. They should also probably stop selling metal coat hangers.[1]
Prohibited: AR-15/M16 armorer’s wrenches or combo wrenches
Really? So I cannot by a castle wrench if it's marketed as for AR-15s?
Prohibited: Magazine loaders, except for those that can accommodate the following calibers: .223/5.56; 7.62x51; 308; 7.62x39; 5.45x39
Okay but .300 AAC, 6.5, 30-06, .338, .50 BMG/Beowulf are fine.
So much irrational hate for the AR-15 platform. It should be right up HNs alley as it is a fully customizable and reparable platform unencumbered by patents.
[1] https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/01/04/coat-hanger-m...
Aside from actual serialized firearms, ammunition, magazines, and some triggers in some state, pretty much every state has no restrictions on firearm accessories such as stocks, grips, slings, sights, and even barrels.
[1] https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/external/help.html?...
Exactly.
> Adjustable stocks are arguably a concern because they make building rifles shorter than 26 inches easier.
You could just not put stock on. An AR-15 with a 16in barrel is 30in with the stock collapsed and cannot be much shorter without the stock because of the buffer tube.
Telescoping stocks maybe not (my inexperience showing there) but folding stocks definitely can take it under 30 inches then. I assume you're saying a normal caliber ar15 won't be very fireable without a buffer tube. Anyways, apparently folding and telescoping stocks are also illegal in California, which might be the real reason amazon has these rules.
They are not illegal to own in California. They are only illegal to be on a semi-automatic center fire rifle with a detachable magazine. So if you mag lock your AR with something like this[1] you can put a telescoping stock on it. This is also legal[2] (with a 10rd magazine) since it is not a center fire rifle.
Again a stock is not integral to the operation of most rifles so you can just not put one on. Oh course then it's legally not considered a rifle most of the time.
[1] https://armaglock.com/product/armaglock/
[2] https://www.smith-wesson.com/firearms/mp-15-22-sport
>Rimfire ammo is limited to smaller calibers since the cartridge walls need to be thin enough to be able to be crushed by the firing pin and ignite the primer.
> The downside?
> Well, the nature of the casing means it’s pretty much limited to small calibers. You have to have some relatively flimsy brass to handle the rimfire set up. As a result, the powder necessary to propel a larger bullet would blow the brass apart.[1]
Correct about the buffer tube. So even if you installed a folding stock on an AR-15, it require some proprietary buffer tube to work like this one.[2]
[1] https://www.pewpewtactical.com/rimfire-vs-centerfire-ammunit...
[2] https://youtu.be/_qr2GTq3v3w
Funny, I just received a VTAC sling from Amazon. I wonder if I was able to buy it due to the "enforcement failures" mentioned in the article or if it's because it is a 2-point sling (obviously much safer than a single point or 3-point sling which are basically weapons of mass destruction).
I always get some enjoyment from making Amazon donate to gun rights organizations with Smile.