Internet trolls on Friday hijacked the auction of the gun George Zimmerman used to kill Trayvon Martin.
One bid on the website of the auctioneer, United Gun Group, for the 9 mm Kel-Tc PF-9 pistol was from a user named “Racist McShootface,” who at one point offered $58 million. Another bidder used the username Tamir Rice, the name of a 12-year-old black boy shot dead by police in Cleveland in 2014 while holding a toy gun.
By late Friday morning, one troll bid the gun up to $65 million, but that was replaced by a bid from a possible real user named Craig Bryant.
In a statement on Facebook Thursday afternoon, United Gun Group said their stance is that as long as Zimmerman is “obeying the letter of the law, his personal firearm sale will be permitted on our network.”
The auction is set to be open for four more days after going live Friday morning, according to United Gun Group.
“FYI, United Gun Group is a free service, we are not being compensated for allowing members to utilize our system,” they said on Twitter Thursday afternoon. “Newsflash people, we do not post auctions. Our members are solely responsible for that.”
The auction of the gun was originally posted on Gun Broker, set to go live at 11 a.m. Eastern Thursday with a reserve price of $5,000. The website removed the auction immediately beforehand and said, “We want no part in the listing on our web site or in any of the publicity it is receiving.”
Zimmerman had a slightly different explanation for moving the location of the gun auction. “Unfortunately, Gun Broker was not prepared for the traffic and publicity surrounding the auction of my firearm. It has now been placed with another auction house.”
Zimmerman originally announced the auction of the weapon, which he called “an American icon,” Wednesday night in an interview with an Orlando news station.
“What I’ve decided to do is not cower,” he said. “I’m a free American. I can do what I want with my possessions.”
Zimmerman, now 32, was charged with second-degree murder and manslaughter in the 2012 fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a black unarmed 17-year-old. At that time, he was a neighborhood watch volunteer in Sanford, Fla. Zimmerman was eventually acquitted by a Florida jury in July 2013 on the grounds of the state’s Stand Your Ground law.
Zimmerman said he would use the proceeds from the sale of the gun to fight the Black Lives Matter movement and its violence against police, and to counter what he called “Hillary Clinton’s anti-firearm rhetoric.”
That listing ended with “if you want peace, prepare for war” in Latin.
