A gun owner on Reddit said selling on Armslist had gotten so frustrating that he compared it to online dating, and not in a flattering way. In the post, he wrote that he had lost count of how many times he had agreed on a price, a time, and a place to meet, only to have the other person flake out. And when people did show up, he said some of them tried a different move: arriving with less money than agreed and acting like the seller should just go along with it. He summed up one of those moments with a line that clearly came from repeated aggravation, saying the guy showed up short on cash and basically tried, “well this is all I got.”
The post itself was short, but it felt like the kind of rant that only comes after someone has dealt with the same nonsense over and over. He was not telling one neat horror story with a beginning, middle, and end. He was describing a pattern. Agree on the terms, set the meetup, waste the time, get lowballed in person, repeat. The whole point of the post was that the actual selling part had started to feel less like a transaction and more like trying to sort through an endless line of people who either were not serious, were not honest, or thought they could pressure the seller once he had already made the drive.
That brought out a flood of stories from other people who clearly knew exactly what he meant. One commenter said he always tells buyers to meet at the police department in his town, just three miles away, because at worst they do not show and he can go eat tacos next door instead of wasting the whole trip. Then he shared the story that fit the original post perfectly. He said he once agreed to drive about 15 miles because he already wanted to go to the store near the meetup spot, only to have the buyer flake and then try to drop the agreed price from $400 to $300 because the gun was “used,” even though the ad had already clearly described it as a police trade-in.
That same commenter kept going, and the story got even more ridiculous. He said that was not even close to the strangest offer he had gotten. According to him, one guy tried to trade a stainless-steel boat propeller for a handgun and, somehow, also wanted the seller to drive 120 miles to his house to pick it up. The commenter then spelled out the obvious problem piece by piece: he did not own a boat, did not own a boat engine, had absolutely no use for a stainless-steel boat propeller, and had no idea why the other guy thought that sounded like a serious offer. In the middle of a thread about bad online buyers, that story probably told the whole mood better than anything else.
Other replies painted the same picture from different angles. One commenter said people in the Facebook groups he used were always expecting once-in-a-lifetime deals and wanted to pay around $275 for a gun worth more than $3,000. Another commenter said Armslist had always been bad, but that charging for access somehow made it feel like people were paying money just to troll sellers and waste their time. Someone else said the site was “straight up dead” in a lot of states after the paywall, while another argued the paywall at least scared off some scammers. Even where people disagreed about why the site was bad, they mostly agreed that selling on it had become miserable.
The original poster’s frustration made more sense the longer the thread went on. He was not just upset that one buyer tried to haggle. He sounded worn down by the kind of people who treat a firearms listing like a place to play games. The buyer who says he is coming and never shows. The guy who suddenly has less cash when he is standing face to face. The person who offers random junk in trade even when the ad says no trades. The whole thing made the “online dating” comparison feel a lot less like a joke and a lot more like the easiest way to describe repeated bad encounters with strangers who act interested until the exact second it matters.
By the end, the thread was less about one single horror story and more about a whole ecosystem of them. The original poster had clearly reached the point where every new message from a potential buyer felt like the beginning of another avoidable headache. He had started with a simple complaint about flaky buyers and lowballers. The replies turned it into something bigger: a long list of people showing up short, ghosting at the last second, asking for absurd trades, or trying to turn a simple sale into a drawn-out waste of time. The way he told it, selling the gun was not even the hard part anymore. Dealing with the people was.
