Guns for sale on eBay

A new warning was sounded today over the sale of guns on the internet.

An investigation found dozens of weapons for sale on auction website eBay, in clear breach of its own rules. The discovery follows a warning from the Metropolitan Police that criminals are increasingly able to obtain guns.

An MP claimed he found 24 guns advertised on eBay's UK website over four days. Labour's Steve McCabe urged the Government to clamp down on the trade. Some advertised guns were deactivated weapons which could be converted by experts to fire live rounds.

Others were replicas of the kind favoured by armed robbers. One man selling a legal air gun boasted that it could be readily converted into a lethal weapon at three times the legal power limit.

While airguns and replicas can be bought and owned legally by adults without a firearms licence, eBay claims they are banned from its website.

But a company spokeswoman conceded: "We have over 30 million items on the site at any one time. We track down illicit items as quickly as we can, but an item may be up for a very short time before it is removed." She added: "eBay is determinedly opposed to gun sales." Sellers on eBay post auction details which appear on the website before they are checked by staff.

The company uses word filtering software to prevent obvious abuses but some banned items slip through the net. Campaigners warned that teenagers, who cannot buy airguns legally, could obtain them readily on eBay. Mr McCabe presented Home Secretary David Blunkett with a dossier regarding gun sales on eBay. Mr McCabe said: "eBay promotes itself as a 'community' of familyfriendly individuals, yet it is allowing dealers to sell weapons without any check on whether they are active or not, and with no control over the age of people buying them.

"It is one of the richest companies in the world, yet it is failing to police its own site properly, and contributing to the crime on our streets by allowing the sale of legal - yet absolutely lethal - weapons."

Linda Mitchell of the Gun Control Network, who set out to investigate the trade after her 12-year-old son was shot with an airgun by a 10-year-old friend, said: "Nobody can be certain what these guns are or that people under 17 are not buying them."

The Home Office pointed out that a review of firearms law is under way which could lead to more restrictions on internet sales.

Gun crime involving imitation and replica weapons has leapt by a third in the past year, according to police figures.

EBay policy states: "We do not allow ammunition, repl ica firearms, stun guns, legal air guns, firearms components or related items to be sold on the site."

Sellers of legal ball-bearing guns on eBay provide alarming descriptions of their strength and accuracy. Other sellers use blatant scams to get around the rules. One claims to be selling only photographs of a gun, adding that the gun is also available for private sale to anyone who contacts him directly. A seller of a "Gunpower Storm" air gun boasts that it is "easily tunable up to high power".

The seller of a deactivated Luger pistol states: "You will need to get in quick in case a do-gooder finds a way of stopping this auction."