By Mr. Greene
Don’t believe what you are hearing from the anti-gun crowd. According to them, the greatest threat to America is not the open border policy of the Biden administration allowing terrorists, criminals, millions of soon-to-be government dependents, to freely flow across. It’s not letting violent criminals out of jail in the name of equity. It is not an all-powerful federal law enforcement agency routinely being used to target and intimidate political opponents.
Nope: It’s the dreaded ghost gun.
What is a ghost gun? It’s a pejorative term coined by those in favor of more government control to describe the guns that good citizens have been producing in their home workshops since before the Revolutionary War. They are homemade guns that don’t have serial numbers and other markings that allow the government to keep track of them. “They are guns that completely avoid regulation,” say the gun banners.
Whatever.
The anti-2A folks really started to lose their minds over homemade guns when “80 percent” receivers hit the market a few years ago. Americans could buy them like any other random chunk of metal and use tools to finish the receiver so that it was useful in a complete firearm. Many who bought them were the kind of good people who were a little suspicious of what the federal government really does with all of the information it collects during a gun shop purchase. Can anyone blame them? Federal law forbids the government from keeping a list of American gun owners but, then, the feds don’t seem too constrained by the rule of law these days.
Ten states have moved to ban homemade firearms, and the ATF recently adopted new regulations to shut it down. ATF began reporting that “up to 30 percent of all guns involved in crime were ghost guns.” A not-so-minor-detail missing from these reports was that the vast majority of these guns were regular, mass-manufactured guns whose serial numbers had been filed off by criminals, something that is already a federal crime.
There are some other minor details ban proponents conveniently ignore, such as: It remains a federal crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison to possess a firearm of any kind if you are a prohibited possessor who could not pass a background check required during gun store purchases. It continues to be a federal felony if you make firearms for other people without a federal firearm manufacturers license. Good guys aren’t whipping these things up by the truckload for the Crips and the Bloods. Gangsters have plenty of street guns to use whenever they want.
Finally, serial numbers on guns are rarely used to solve crimes, other than in the movies. With the rare and exceedingly dumb exceptions, criminals don’t use guns that can be traced back to them; they use black market/stolen guns that trace back to someone else. So, ghost guns don’t lead to fewer crimes being solved.
The move to ban “ghost guns” is all about more government control. Period. The real question is when the focus is going to shift to the important shit, like keeping violent criminals in jail?
