'Avid gun owner' documents ease of buying AR-15 in Facebook post to 'shine a flashlight'
“I just wanted to show the truth,” Coley Brown told ABC News.
— -- The “avid” gun-owning South Carolina man who posted a video documenting his step-by-step purchase of a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle wanted the world to see how easy it is for the sake of transparency, he told ABC News today, a week after the deadly shooting at a Florida high school with a similar weapon.
“Just trying to shine a flashlight,” Coley Brown said today of gun purchases in his home state. “If you have nothing to hide then you shouldn’t mind having a little light shed on what you’re doing.”
Brown, 49, posted the video on his Facebook page Feb. 16, detailing his transaction with a seller he found on a private Facebook group. He “didn’t get a receipt, nobody checked my driver’s license, nothing,” he said on the video.
Brown, who calls himself as pro-gun as someone can be, has a concealed weapons permit, he told ABC News. He has been hunting since he was a teenager, he added, and has a teenage son who hunts deer and ducks.
Brown is always troubled by school shootings, he said, but this one, in which 17 people died, really resonated with him because he has kids in high school.
Brown starts the video by finding a Facebook group with people looking to sell weapons. After picking the one he wanted, he sent a private Facebook message to the seller, before negotiating the price.
South Carolina gun laws state that “a resident of any state may purchase rifles and shotguns in this state if the resident conforms to applicable provisions of statutes and regulations of this state, the United States, and of the state in which the person resides.”
Facebook prohibits the actual purchase, sale or trade of firearms on its pages so Brown and the seller had to discuss price in a private Facebook message.
In less than 20 hours, Brown found the gun he wanted, negotiated with the seller and drove to meet the person and purchase the AR-15 with over 30 rounds of ammo.
Brown said his goals in posting the condensed video were to share the facts about gun purchases in his state and provide people with as much information as he could.
“I just wanted to show the truth,” Brown told ABC News. “I just saw all this misinformation on how to acquire a gun and what the laws are on guns.”