‘Ghost guns’ in the crosshairs

Richmond — When Marcus Simon walked into a gun show in Fredericksburg, Virginia, he paid cash for a do-it-yourself firearm kit and walked out — no identification or background check required.

After about 90 minutes of work, Simon — a member of the Virginia House of Delegates — had assembled his own essentially untraceable gun, he said.

“This made it very real,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “These guys wouldn’t be at the gun show selling these devices if there weren’t people out there trying to purchase them.”

“And then to see that it’s doable — and not too difficult, maybe even easier for a 16- or 17-year-old to do, it sort of creates some urgency about the whole thing.”

Now, Simon and legislators across the country are spearheading legislation in 2024 to outlaw so-called “ghost guns” — so named because they frequently come without serial numbers and can be difficult for law enforcement to trace.

Across the country, the number of suspected privately made firearms recovered by law enforcement and submitted to the federal government for tracing jumped from 1,629 in 2017 to 19,273 in 2021 — a 1,083% increase, according to a 2023 report from the US justice department.

The guns can be made via 3D printers or, as in Simon’s case, do-it-yourself kits — and rapid advances in technology have the federal government, states and cities struggling to keep up with the ever-evolving problem.

“I think a lot more states are going to prohibit these,” said Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston.

“Every year, these unserialised, homemade guns are a bigger and bigger portion of what police are recovering from crime scenes when they actually find a gun.”

NEW ACTION IN STATES

A handful of states, including Virginia, are moving forward in 2024 on trying to prohibit or restrict such weapons and about a dozen other states have enacted their own restrictions in recent years.

Simon’s legislation, a version of which has passed both the state House and Senate, would make it illegal to sell or possess a firearm not imprinted with a valid serial number.

“We’re not trying to ban technology,” he said. “We’re just trying to make sure it’s treated the same way as any other firearm.”

Part of the issue, he said, is that as states like Virginia tighten other gun laws, 3D-printing and self-made gun kits become more attractive options for those who might be looking to skirt the legislation.

Under federal law, people convicted of a felony are generally barred from buying firearms.

“We’re chasing the technology a little bit, right, and we want to make sure that we don’t let it get ahead of us,” Simon said.

Advocates are pushing for similar legislation in other states, including Massachusetts and Vermont.

Police departments in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — Pennsylvania’s two largest cities — started to more closely track the issue in recent years and found a significant uptick in the number of ghost guns recovered at crime scenes, said Adam Garber with CeaseFirePA, a gun control advocacy group.

“That was really what started to change the conversation because [it] became so clear that it had become this weapon of choice for people who are prohibited from owning firearms,” he said.

3D printing technology — now used to manufacture everything from houses to cars — has advanced rapidly in the firearms space in the past decade from the early single-shot pistols that broke easily, said David Pucino, legal director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The advances have reached the point where weapons with functions indistinguishable from popular semi-automatic firearms like the AR-15 can be made, he said.

While US gun culture and its relatively lax firearms laws stand alone compared with the rest of the world, ghost guns have increasingly become a public safety concern in Europe as well.

In 2022, the Biden administration moved to rein in the use of ghost guns, and in February 2024 asked the US supreme court to overturn a ruling by a lower court that had declared the new rules unlawful.

FREE SPEECH

Gun rights advocates challenging such bans argue they infringe the right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the second amendment to the US constitution.

However, laws requiring guns to have serial numbers, or for them to be registered with the government, could be acceptable, said Alan Gottlieb, founder of the pro-gun Second Amendment Foundation.

“But when you say a person can’t make a gun in their own home, that’s a total violation of the second amendment,” he said.

Defense Distributed, a Texas-based group that produced one of the early online blueprints for do-it-yourself guns, has attempted to put forward the novel argument that trying to stop the plans was akin to banning computer code — making it a free-speech issue in addition to a gun rights issue.

Stevenson said pending action from the supreme court could foment another wave of activity at the state level.

“I think you will see — the states that have Democrat-controlled legislatures — if/when the federal ban is upheld, I expect them all to line up and have their own state law,” he said.

For now, states like Colorado, where a new ban on the sale or possession of firearms and parts without serial numbers went into effect in January — are labouring to keep up with the pace of technology.

“I would hope that other states would follow — even more conservative states — because these ghost guns pose a danger to everyone,” said Eileen McCarron with Colorado Ceasefire, an advocacy group.

“Guns aren’t picky about your political persuasion when they’re [wreaking] their havoc.” 

Thomson Reuters Foundation