Proliferation of ghost guns poses gun control nightmare

Mark this on your April calendar: President Joe Biden does something about ghost guns.

First, a little ghost gun background. The only truly good news is that they have nothing to do with evil spirits of long-deceased revolvers floating around your house in the middle of the night.

The bad news is that they're very easy to obtain and pretty darned popular — perhaps because they often have no serial numbers.

Those of us who worry about gun proliferation used to obsess about “the iron pipeline,” aka I-95, along which weapons were ferried from Southern states where they were easy to purchase to Northern destinations.

Now shipping through the iron pipeline is sort of like keeping in touch with all your friends and family by writing lovely letters on your personal stationery. So … 20th century. Today if you want an offthe-records gun, you go online of course. You order a ghost, which arrives at your home in pieces, ready to be assembled.

“This is as big a threat as anything I've ever seen,” said John Feinblatt, head of Everytown for Gun Safety.

The New York Police Department, which reported seizing 47 ghost guns in 2019 and 375 last year, said that as of early this week, it had already confiscated 106 in 2022. True, it's still only a small chunk of the total number of weapons the police collected, many of which had probably been hanging around the house/ gang/car trunk for ages. But think about the ghost guns that'll be piling up in the years to come.

Meanwhile, shootings keep coming. Two weekends ago, 29 people were hit in New York City, one of them mortally wounded during an argument in the Bronx. And New York's hardly alone. Los Angeles and San Francisco are in similar nightmares.

And how's Biden, who clearly sees himself as a champion of gun safety regulation, doing? Biden's been consistent, if not always successful. His first attempt to name a director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives imploded when the Second Amendment lobby managed to torpedo the nomination of gun control activist David Chipman last year.

“Either this was impossible to win, or the strategy failed,” Chipman said afterward — an analysis that could be used for many, many administration encounters with the Senate.

But Biden, who's still without a permanent ATF director, did direct the Department of Justice to help stop ghost gun proliferation. That was a year ago. The department complied rather quickly, opening the new rules for comment last May. Public comment closed in August, and then…

Well, here we are. Waiting for word.

Biden also requested a ton of money for the ATF in his budget — presuming the budget gets passed and there's a new director who'll know how to spend it.

So how's the president doing? Feel free to vote:

A. Ghost guns! Hey, he's got a start.

B. Ghost guns! Good grief, is that all he's done?

C. Well, as long as he delivers before the Easter Egg Roll.