“Ghost gun” is a term designed to scare the hell out of the uninitiated. For better or worse, though, it worked. People are terrified about the idea of untraceable firearms, never realizing how many guns with serial numbers can’t really be traced, either.

Now, people are working very hard to ban these untraceable “ghost guns.”

One state recently passed a law doing just that. However, gun rights advocates haven’t fallen for the fearmongering nonsense. They’ve filed suit to overturn the law.

A Delaware-based gun rights group is suing the state of Nevada over its ban on ghost guns that was recently enacted.

The group, called the Firearms Policy Coalition, filed a lawsuit in a Nevada federal court Thursday seeking to permanently enjoin the state from enforcing Assembly Bill 286, which Gov. Steve Sisolak (D) signed just three days earlier. 

Assembly Bill 286 prohibits a person from manufacturing, possessing, purchasing, transferring, transporting or selling unfinished frames or receivers that are not imprinted with a serial number. Violators of the provision could face misdemeanor or felony charges, depending on the offense.

The bill was sponsored by Assemblywoman Sandra Jauregui (D), who has committed to pushing gun reform in the state. According to The Associated Press, she survived the October 2017 mass shooting at the Mandalay Bay Hotel in Las Vegas that left at least 59 people dead.

The coalition alleges that the bill is unconstitutional on the grounds that government “cannot narrow the channels for exercising the right to keep and bear arms by limiting one’s access to the essential instruments of that right to limited, government-approved manufacturers of firearms and firearm predecessor materials.”

That’s a hell of an argument, actually.

The truth of the matter is that people in this country have always been able to make their own firearms. They’ve been doing so since before this country even existed. Nothing new has happened on that front.

What did happen, though, is that doing so got popular. People started doing it in larger and larger numbers and that became the problem. So, anti-gunners have been working to shut the whole damn thing down. By shutting down people’s ability to build their own firearms, Nevada has, indeed, created a funnel toward licensed gun manufacturers.

That’s really not the American way.

While it’s easy to lash out at so-called ghost guns, they’re still not nearly as ubiquitous at crime scenes as the media generally would like you to think. Most reports fail to mention any real numbers with which a reader could make up their own mind about the threat. When they do, they’re generally pretty low. They’re simply not a significant threat.

Frankly, there are much better ways to address violent crime, anyway.

Of course, I don’t expect lawmakers in Nevada to see it that way. They’ve guzzled the anti-gun Kool-Aid by the gallon lately, so they’re not going to think of things in those sorts of terms.

Hence, the lawsuit.

I personally wish the Firearms Policy Coalition well in its efforts. This kind of thing needs to be shut down and shut down hard. So hard that other states will stop trying to ban “ghost guns” in an effort to blame the tool and not the tool misusing it.