Every topic in politics has some degree of nuance to it. It's difficult to be an expert in all areas, but that has never stopped people from offering up opinions on virtually everything under the sun. They're free to do so, just as we're free to mock their ignorance.

When it comes to guns, though, it gets especially bad. We've seen it a thousand times, and that's not hyperbole at this point. It's probably understating the actual numbers.

Take this one from Slate that talks about the "ghost gun" restrictions that will go before the Supreme Court. Their headline? "The Supreme Court Could Strike Down One of the Most Effective Gun Safety Measures in Recent Memory."

That's a bold statement, and there's absolutely nothing to back that up.

RAND, for example, in their review of gun control studies, doesn't even look at so-called ghost guns. There's just not much, if any research on the topic.

Still, they persist...

Last year, a federal report revealed that the use of ghost guns in crimes has risen more than 1,000 percent in recent years. Can you talk about the sudden proliferation of these guns and their impact on violent crime?

Back in 2017 and 2018, law enforcement was recovering 1,000 or maybe 2,000 of these ghost guns nationwide. We saw the number of recoveries start to jump around 2019, and by 2021, the number had risen to 19,000. By 2022, law enforcement was recovering something like 25,000 of these ghost guns at crime scenes across the nation. The industry’s business model is fundamentally premised on circumventing gun laws, selling to people who otherwise could not purchase firearms. We’re talking about violent felons, minors, and domestic abusers, who can go online and buy “a pistol in a box,” which is the term the industry used to describe these kits. Not surprisingly, these became the weapon of choice for people who couldn’t get their hands on a firearm legally and wanted to put them to ill use.

Now, let's think for a moment about the total number of guns at crime scenes in the United States.

Just in homicides, we had over 14,000 in 2022. That doesn't count literally every other crime out there. In 2019, the FBI reported just under 1.2 million violent crimes in total. Applying 2022's total number of unserialized firearms to 2019's violent crime numbers gives us a little over two percent of all those crimes were connected with a "ghost gun."

Of course, 2022's violent crime numbers are going to be different, but it's going to be different enough to make a meaningful difference in my overall point, that so-called ghost guns account for a tiny fraction of the guns used in criminal actions.

We should also note that they say "crime scenes" not "violent crime scenes." That means they could raid a drug dealer's house and find guns like these, which means an even lower percentage of these guns are connected to any act of violence.

But the so-called experts--anti-gun activists working for an anti-gun organization--say there's evidence that the restrictions worked!

I feel like most gun cases reach the Supreme Court with primarily theoretical implications. Nobody knows exactly what will happen if the court strikes down this or that law. But here, we have a real-world experiment where there is a rule that has taken effect and it had an immediate and meaningful impact on reducing violent crime. It is reducing crime in cities that had seen a surge of murders and other violent offenses committed with ghost guns. Now the stakes for the Supreme Court are, or should be, very clear and concrete. We have very clear evidence that if the court strikes down this rule, it will essentially revive some of the companies that have been basically put out of business. It will allow these companies to keep flooding the streets with ghost gun kits and will all but ensure that people will needlessly die being shot by weapons that should have remained illegal if SCOTUS had done its job right.

Except, again, there's absolutely no evidence of these restrictions doing anything.

What's in the bolded section has no supporting evidence with it, just an assertion that things are working. Of course, the "experts" support this with a single anecdote that's supposed to mean something while ignoring how the rule doesn't actually prevent that exact thing from happening, but again, no data.

And let's note that while violent crime is down, even some very anti-gun cities are arguing that they've made great steps that weren't related to gun control. Cam wrote about Philadelphia, as just one example. I've talked about others at our sister site, Townhall. They've seen a drop in violent crime and it wasn't because of any supposed ghost gun ban.

At the end of the day, what Slate and their experts need to understand is that bans on so-called ghost guns don't actually stop bad people from making their own guns. That ship has long since set sale. At most, the regulation means that instead of buying it in one easy kit, you have to buy all the parts separately. That's it.

And it's stupid.

People have made their own guns since before this nation was a nation. What they're upset about is that now that it's been democratized by making it accessible to anyone rather than people with particular skills, suddenly their chances of disarming us are shattered.

Frankly, that's kind of the point.