On the morning of May 18, 2018, a 17-year-old armed with a shotgun and handgun walked into Sante Fe High School in Santa Fe, Texas, and shot and killed ten of his classmates and teachers, and wounded another 13, in one of the country’s deadliest school shootings. Before the shooting, the 17-year-old shooter purchased his shotgun and handgun ammunition online using his real name, address, and a prepaid gift card.
According to federal law, licensed manufacturers and dealers cannot sell rifle or shotgun ammunition to anyone they know or have reasonable cause to believe is under 18 years old, or handgun ammunition to anyone they know or have reasonable cause to believe is under 21 years old. It’s also illegal for any unlicensed individual or entity to sell ammunition suitable only for use in a handgun to anyone they know or have reasonable cause to believe is under 18.1Note: Six of the seven online retailers in this study appear to have Federal Firearms Licenses (FFLs) as of this writing. But many ammo dealers do not have FFLs. But these laws were written before the internet existed, and thus do not specifically address the kind of impersonal online sales that are now possible. In the deadly example noted above, before carrying out his attack in Sante Fe, the underaged shooter purchased his shotgun and handgun ammunition without even needing to leave his home. Instead, as alleged in a lawsuit brought by Everytown Law, online retailer LuckyGunner did not require him to provide any form of identification or prove his age. In fact, LuckyGunner’s automated system approved the sales in less than two minutes.
Eight states have enacted laws that seek to account for ammunition sales as they occur in the age of the internet. Some states require background checks on all ammunition sales. Other states have established permitting schemes to ensure that customers are old enough to purchase ammunition. And other states require sellers to verify state-issued identification cards to verify eligibility. Online ammunition dealers have largely either complied with these local requirements or opted not to sell ammunition in those states altogether. Still, an outdated regulatory scheme continues to be the only standard in place in the overwhelming majority of states — such as Texas, where LuckyGunner sold the ammunition used in the Santa Fe shooting.
LuckyGunner’s past conduct begs the question: What do other online ammunition sellers — who have no in-person interactions with customers, and typically only automated checkouts — do to ensure they are not selling ammunition to those who can’t legally purchase it, including minors and convicted felons? As it turns out, not much that we could observe. This report details an investigation by the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund (“Everytown”) of several major online ammunition retailers which found that none appeared to verify a purchaser’s age or that they could legally purchase ammunition. At most, some of these sites bury the legal requirements of purchasing ammunition in their terms and conditions, or they have a checkbox that a purchaser must click — but none of these measures do anything to prevent a minor from checking out of the site with ammunition.
To make matters worse, ammunition can be shipped directly to individuals in most states, removing any need for customers to visit a brick-and-mortar store.
Websites in other industries employ a variety of age verification tools. To prevent minors from buying alcohol, online retailers typically require that customers first submit some form of government-issued photo identification. The same is true for gambling websites and tobacco e-tailers. Only after receiving that information and verifying its authenticity, sometimes through a third party dedicated to the task, will these sites proceed with a sale or allow someone to place a wager. In fact, a number of independently tested and verified services exist to verify customer ages at the point of online sale for very low costs.2See the Age Verification Providers Association for more details about available age verification technologies: https://avpassociation.com/. Another strategy used by the alcohol industry is to require proof of age at the point of delivery.3See Drizzly, “Alcohol delivery in New York,” accessed March 4, 2024, https://drizly.com/alcohol-delivery/ny/new-york-city/re77. But as we have uncovered, except where expressly required by state law, ammunition sellers appear to largely eschew any of these strategies in their online marketplaces. For these vendors, it appears an unverified click asserting age eligibility is enough to complete a sale.
To see if major online retailers prevent sales to underage customers, Everytown investigators purchased .223 Remington ammunition — the most common caliber for AR-15-style weapons — from seven different companies that sell ammunition online. The purchases were made by an adult well over 21 years old and from a state that does not place restrictions on ammunition sales. Of the seven online retailers, none requested that the customer prove their age by supplying a driver’s license, for example, before completing the transactions.
A small number of online sellers in specific age-restricted industries may conduct covert age verification on the back end of an online sale (i.e., not observable to a consumer). Circumstantial evidence, however, strongly suggests that online ammunition sellers are generally not conducting any such covert age verification. First, best practices provide that any such verification research on the back end of a sale be disclosed in the terms and conditions or privacy policy of the site. In examining the online ammunition sellers profiled below, we found no mention of covert age verification on their websites. Indeed, it would be surprising to learn that online ammunition companies were not disclosing covert research on their customers, especially considering the privacy arguments often advanced by Second Amendment advocates in policy debates. Second, there have been several publicly reported instances of young people — who would have been restricted had their ages been verified — buying ammunition sold online.
When purchasing .223 Remington ammunition from BH Ammo, the buyer had to check a box to affirm that they were at least 21 and legally allowed to own the ammunition. But BH Ammo did not request proof of age, such as identification, from the buyer. The rifle rounds were delivered to their doorstep eight days later.