“Characterization of Illegal Dark Web Arms Markets”, 2019-09 (; backlinks; similar):
The nature of online underground gun markets on the dark web has been relatively under-researched in comparison to those regarding drugs or malware. This work attempts to improve the general understanding of the nature of these markets, with a longitudinal assessment of the market as a whole. From this assessment, the various properties that characterize the market such as overall sales and the breadth of items on offer can be catalogued and compared against offline markets, or other online markets.
In addition to this longitudinal study, the online communities surrounding the sale of firearms were identified, with topic models fit to the datasets spanning ~5 years, with the intent of characterizing and comparing them to each other in a more structured manner. Once the topic models were generated, documents were drawn from before and after mass shooting attacks. These documents were then labeled by the separate topic models, and then contrasted and compared against each other in order to assess the reactions of these communities to traumatic events, thus observing if there were clear patterns of behavior universal across these communities.
Online underground arms markets were found to be generally thin, albeit larger in scale than a few years before, and appear to be predominantly focused on the sale of rifles, pistols, and custom orders. Gun communities online were observed to differ depending on the strictness of moderation of their parent communities, though still have a number of shared topics, such as gun legislation or usage. Furthermore, the assessed communities varied heavily in their reactions to attacks, further highlighting their differences.