AGs backing lawsuit to regulate ‘ghost guns’
The attorneys general of D.C., Maryland and Virginia are supporting a federal lawsuit seeking to have the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regulate the widely sold parts of homemade “ghost guns” as firearms, in an attempt to stop the steadily increasing use of the untraceable firearms in crimes across the country.
The parts for a “ghost gun” can be ordered easily on the internet, and instructional videos show how an “80% lower” part of a gun can be milled, drilled and combined with the upper 20% — the trigger, the barrel, the firing pin — to make a gun that has no serial number and requires no background check.
After D.C. police began recovering increasing numbers of the guns, often connected to crimes, the District this year passed emergency legislation banning the kits used to make ghost guns. D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine also filed a consumer protection lawsuit in June against one of the largest makers of the gun parts, Polymer80, which is pending.
In 2017, D.C. police found three such guns, and by last year that number had risen to 116. In those three years, Racine said, nine ghost guns were reportedly involved in homicides. This year, local and federal police had recovered 282 ghost guns in the city as of Dec. 17, according to the District’s Department of Forensic Sciences.
The local attorneys general joined 16 other state attorneys general in a brief supporting a federal suit filed in the Southern District of New York by the cities of Syracuse, N.Y., San Jose, Calif., Chicago and Columbia, S.C., and the pro-gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety, against the ATF, the Justice Department and the U.S. attorney general. The suit targets several “interpretive rulings” issued by the ATF to gun-parts manufacturers in recent years, stating that the unfinished lower and upper parts of guns are not, themselves, firearms.
The ATF’s website says that “items such as receiver blanks, ‘castings’ or ‘ machined bodies’ in which the fire-control cavity area is completely solid and unmachined have not reached the ‘stage of manufacture’ that would result in the classification of a firearm” under federal law.
The manufacturers then posted the ATF rulings on their websites to reassure customers that the parts they are buying are legal. Such rulings “encouraged and emboldened the ghost gun industry to sell its products nationwide,” even in states that have banned them, the filing said. Since 2015, D.C. and six states have enacted ghost-gun-specific statutes, the attorneys general said in their amicus brief.
There are about 80 online sellers of partially finished lower frames (for handguns) and receivers (for long guns). The ATF said last year that about 30% of guns recovered in California had no serial numbers. Ghost guns were used in mass shootings at Santa Monica College in 2013 and in Rancho Tehama, Calif., in 2017, made by men who were prohibited from buying weapons.
“The ATF’s reckless interpretation of the law and lack of regulation could lead to more untraceable guns on our streets, potentially putting Virginians and their families at risk,” Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring said in a news release.
The ATF has not yet responded to the suit in New York. But in a similar suit filed by California, two fathers of ghost-gun shooting victims and the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the agency defended its interpretation of the federal Gun Control Act of 1968. The bureau argued that “a receiver blank may not ‘readily be converted’ into a firearm,” because it requires numerous milling and metalworking steps, and “a working gun cannot be produced ‘without difficulty.’“
The unfinished gun parts are “therefore not a ‘firearm’ within the meaning of the statute,” Justice Department attorneys said last month in the California case.