The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the legality of Joe Biden's ATF rule treating "buy, build, shoot" kits as completed firearms, but it may be a moot point if Donald Trump ends up rescinding the order and directing the ATF to return to the status quo.
That's the last thing the anti-gunners want, of course, and the Bloomberg-backed website The Trace is up to its usual scaremongering over the issue, including tying in the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson to the ongoing crackdown on homebuilt guns.
The assassination jolted the public. While it didn’t necessarily indicate that untraceable weapons were becoming more prevalent, it did raise questions about the state of the ghost guns market. Was Polymer80’s closure a sign that the market was shriveling up — or was it, hydralike, sprouting new heads?
Law enforcement officials, small arms researchers, and ghost gun manufacturers who recently spoke to The Trace described the law enforcement gains against ghost guns as tenuous at best, especially in light of the Trump administration’s aversion to new regulations. Ghost gun technology, they warned, is only getting more sophisticated — and as a result, the weapons are becoming more appealing to criminals.
Guns in general are appealing to violent criminals. Building their own is becoming easier, but it's not like it's all that difficult for someone to illlegally get a mass-produced firearm through theft, a straw purchase, family or friends, or the illicit market.
The Biden administration's rule treating "Buy, Build, Shoot" kits as completed firearms was aimed at curtailing the market in homebuilt guns, but thanks to legal challenges and advances in technology, privately manufactured firearms may be more popular than ever.
We reviewed the websites of 12 online retailers known for offering ghost gun kits and found that at least four were continuing to sell them. The Trace showed the listings to Rick Vasquez, a former ATF firearms expert. He said that while these four retailers were likely violating the new rule, selling the kits is something of a legal gray area while the regulation is being considered by the Supreme Court.
Other companies responded to the new rule by overhauling their business. Defense Distributed — the ghost gun manufacturer founded by Cody Wilson, inventor of the first fully 3D-printed firearm — refocused on selling a desktop machine capable of turning blocks of aluminum or steel into finished gun frames. Wilson had first released a version of the machine more than a decade ago.
Wilson says his business is nowhere near the behemoth Polymer80 was, but he sees his machine as a step toward a more populist future in which gun ownership is beyond the control of governments and big corporations.
“Some of the things happening in 3D guns I think are distasteful, but that’s part of popular politics,” Wilson said. “There’s an element of defiance or challenge to the government: Can you really control the flow of arms?”
Even before the advent of 3D printed firearms or 80% receivers, it was utterly impossible to ensure that guns wouldn't end up in the hands of criminals. Now anti-gun activists are trying to censor the files used to create 3D-printed guns and are fighting to keep Biden's "ghost gun" rule in place, but there's no way to put this genie back in the bottle. Still, The Trace does its best to scare the bejeebers ouf ot its audience about what Trump might do with Biden's order.
The consequences would almost certainly be deadly, providing a way for prohibited purchasers to quietly arm themselves, according to Felipe Rodriguez, a John Jay College criminal justice professor and retired New York City police detective.
“The reason people get ghost guns is because they can’t get [traditional firearms] legally,” Rodriguez said, “because they can’t go through the background checks.”
That's simply not true. I know plenty of gun owners who've built their own firearms because it's fun, because they don't want the government to pry into their gun ownership, or just because they can.
The gun control lobby can't win its war on homebuilt firearms. They can increase the penalties for building your own, but while that may dissuade the next Dexter Taylor from printing a gun it's not going to stop a cartel member or gang leader from illegally making a gun if that's the easiest way for them to arm themselves.
Like it or not, "ghost guns" are here to stay, and we need to be talking more about how to prevent violent crime in general than launching a quixotic effort to rid the world of privately manufactured pistols and rifles.
