Here is what he wrote:
https://thetab.com/us/2016/06/14/i-was-able-to-buy-an-ar-15-in-five-minutes-19833
Lets take a moment to examine the facts and deal with the truth in this young man's article. First off this young man is a liar. The title of his post is "I was able to buy an AR-15 in 5 minutes", yet by his own admission he tells us that he walked out before he finished the paperwork, completed the background check or paid for his purchase. He chose the title with the intent of twisting the truth for personal gain (ad revenue) and making a political statement. He wants people to believe that he could have actually taken possession of an AR-15 without a background check and using his expired ID. This is not true. The reason the salesman sent him to his car for his registration was PRECISELY BECAUSE HIS ID WAS EXPIRED. BATFE regulations allow for persons that have renewed their licence, but have yet to receive it in the mail to still complete purchases if and ONLY if they have a second piece of state issued ID to verify their address and identity. Yet our young hero tells us ignorantly that "he didn't notice that my licence had expired recently". He is trying so hard to paint the situation with his twisted agenda, yet he is damned by his own facts.
Mr. Davis wants us to believe that the shop would have sold him a gun even though his ID was expired, but here are the facts about this portion of his narrative. The federal form 4473 (a form that must accompany every firearm sale since 1968) requires that the expiration date of your ID to be written down and if it is expired the transaction must be stopped until the purchaser acquires a current ID. This is not something that gunshops ignore. The BATFE is very strict about all portions of the paperwork and if a Federal Firearms Licence holder (gunshop) sells a firearm to someone with an expired ID they will lose their licence and be put out of business. In this case he had the required alternative documents to satisfy BATFE requirements, The shop he visited didn't skirt or bend the law. He wants the reader to think that, but again the facts are not on his side.
As for the matter of the shotgun and its stock, he also wants us to believe misleading information. Both of the shotguns he photographed are Mossbergs and both come from the factory with a pistol grip installed. In the case of the second one pictured it ships from the factory with both a shoulder stock and pistol grip. He makes it sound like they were bending the law to accommodate his age. This is his second big lie. The salespeople helping him were simply making him aware that because of his age he couldn't purchase the shotgun with the pistol grip attached. They were polite and pleasant about it and he wants us to interpret that courtesy as bending the rules for the sake of making money. If he had stayed to complete the purchase (like he wants us to believe he did, ergo his click-bait title) they would have removed the pistol grip and he would have left with a full length shotgun, assuming his FBI NICS background check had come back as a Proceed.
This brings up a fact rarely mentioned, that bears a few moments of pause: EVERY PURCHASE OF A FIREARMS IN THIS COUNTRY HAS BEEN REVIEWED AND APPROVED BY THE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. The fact that Omar Mateen obtained his firearms is not a failure of the shop that sold them to him, it is a failure of the FBI which in turn is a failure of policy that allowed an openly violent muslim man who made no secret of his extreme hatred and intent to commit violent acts, to be taken off of the watch list simply because it is career suicide under the Obama administration to pursue investigations of Islamic persons.
In this era of Yellow Journalism we must be careful about what pieces of "news" and their "facts" we share and believe. In my experience, especially on social media. we click and post the things that fit the narrative we want to believe. Here is a piece of advice, if the title of an article makes you want to click, maybe you shouldn't swallow it whole as fact and truth. The title was crafted with the purpose to grab your attention and draw your finger. As we all know, if I read it on the internet. it must be true.
As for the political motivations of Mr. Davis he tells us his opinion, He thinks that things need to change to stop young law abiding men from being able to purchase a firearm. But this argument is a strawman. Would he draw the same conclusions about how easy it is to purchase a purchase a boxcutter or a knife, or rent a large moving truck or purchase fertilizer or diesel fuel? No he doesn't because there is nothing to be gained by calling for knife control, or seeking additional regulations on rental trucks, or farm supplies. Why isn't he calling for closer scrutiny of young angry Muslim men? Because less people would click his article if the title was something like "Profiling Young Arab Men Would Have Stopped Omar". But the simple facts according to the FBI are that as the number of firearms purchased each year continues to rise, the number of people murdered with firearms continues to drop. Every year. So if Mr. Davis really wants to effect some real change, he should go back to that store (after he turns 21) and purchase himself a handgun to carry concealed and take the class that allows him to legally carry it. And the next time he's hanging out with his friends in a nightclub and an evil man comes in to slaughter innocent people, he can draw his pistol and stop the madman before he can carry out his agenda of death. Wicked men will always be a part of our life and they will always have ways to commit mass murder if they set out to do so. The only answer that history has proven effective to stop such violence is for good men to stand up and stop them when they rear their ugly heads. We saw what happened when terrorists targeted people in a nation that has zero guns in private hands, they killed far more than 50. Disarming a nation doesn't work, regulation doesn't work, and angry young men spewing misinformation and lies certainly doesn't help.
TL;DR Laws don't stop lawless men
