In Stokinger v. Armslist, LLC, No. 24-1697 (1st Cir. Feb. 5, 2026), the First Circuit holds that an online marketplace for firearms based in Pennsylvania engaged in “purposeful availment” of New Hampshire because it had a geographic-filtering mechanism on its website that would-be purchasers could use to search for firearms offered for sale where “they live,” and an “average of ‘16,000 listings per year for firearms for sale in New Hampshire’ . . . were posted on Armslist.com from 2018 on.”
“The company was sued in the United States District Court for the District of New Hampshire under New Hampshire law for, among other things, negligence and public nuisance. The plaintiffs are Kurt Stokinger, a former Boston police officer, and his wife, Janella Stokinger (together, the ‘Stokingers’). Their claims allege that Armslist — through its website — facilitated the sale of a firearm in New Hampshire in 2015 that was used in 2016 to shoot Officer Stokinger in Boston.”
Armslist moved to dismiss, holding that the company had no presence in New Hampshire on which to base personal jurisdiction in that forum. The district court granted the motion “on the ground that Armslist had not purposefully availed itself of the protections of New Hampshire’s laws.”
The First Circuit reverses in part. “The Stokingers rely . . . solely on a theory of specific jurisdiction. They thus must satisfy each prong of the specific-jurisdiction test: (1) relatedness, (2) purposeful availment, and (3) reasonableness.”
“In ruling that the Stokingers failed to make a prima facie showing of specific jurisdiction, the District Court skipped over the relatedness requirement. It ruled that, even assuming that the Stokingers’ claims were related to the contacts that they relied on to establish specific jurisdiction, those contacts failed to make a prima facie case that Armslist had purposefully availed itself of the protections of New Hampshire’s laws.”
Plaintiff’s presented three kinds of evidence to establish purposeful availment: “(1) the design of Armslist.com, (2) the advertising revenue that Armslist generated from visitors to its website, and (3) the average of “16,000 listings per year for firearms for sale in New Hampshire” that were posted on Armslist.com from 2018 on.”
The panel upholds the district court’s conclusion that the first two categories of evidence did not support purposeful availment by themselves. The website design “to facilitate what [defendant] itself refers to as ‘local’ transactions” was not specific to New Hampshire. And “the mere fact that the website could be used to have such a forum-state impact was not enough to make a prima facie case of purposeful availment . . . . absent more direct evidence that the defendant knew that the website’s capabilities were being so utilized.” Plaintiffs, moreover, did not present evidence on the amount of revenue Armslist earned from New Hampshire.
Yet the evidence of 16,000 yearly entries tagged for New Hampshire, combined with the other allegations, provided at least prima facie proof of purposeful availment. “[I]t shows that, from 2018 on, thousands of people each year were accessing Armslist.com and seeking to sell their firearms in New Hampshire specifically. And so, based on this additional evidence concerning the volume of “New Hampshire” listings, we find that Armslist had reason to know not merely that its website was capable of being used to facilitate firearm sales in New Hampshire but that it was, in fact, being so used.”
“Additionally, we conclude that Armslist was not merely a passive bystander to the website being so used . . . . It had ‘voluntarily’ taken an affirmative step to increase the likelihood that a firearm being offered for sale in New Hampshire would be purchased in that same state. It had implemented its geographic-filtering mechanism to enable would-be buyers to find firearms being offered for sale in the state and thus make a deal there and not in some other place.”
The panel distinguished this case from the common feature on websites of a drop-down menu to select a user’s place of residence. Such a feature “merely demonstrate[s]” that the website owner is “willing to accept [business] from [such] residents,” not that it “was targeting [those] residents through its website.”
Because the district court did not rule on the relatedness and reasonableness, the panel remands the case for further proceedings.
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