By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Finding a really nice classic Mustang is not always easy
and is never cheap, and, for years, a handful of very committed car enthusiasts
have been making an end-run around the classic-car market and the restoration
industry both by more or less building entirely new cars from the parts
catalogue. This is something that is a lot easier to do with very popular
classics such as the Mustang than it would be with (alas!) the 1966 Volvo P1800
I very stupidly bought as a broke college student. In reality, building a new
Mustang from the catalogue entails a lot more than ordering the parts and
putting them together — there is a reason most cars are built in factories
rather than in artisans’ workshops. But you can do it, if you really want to.
You can build a gun from scratch, too, if you have the
inclination and the skills. Contrary to what a great many people seem to think,
there isn’t any law against it. There never has been, at least at the federal
level. There are many kits you can buy to build old-style black-powder muskets
and Kentucky rifles — a relatively easy project whose main challenges are
related to woodworking rather than mechanics. But you can build sophisticated
modern firearms, too. If you are a skilled machinist and have the right
equipment, you can build one entirely from scratch. If that is too much for
you, then you can build one from commercially available parts that simply need
to be assembled — but you will have to pass a federal background check when
purchasing the “receiver,” which is what the ATF considers a firearm when it is
complete or almost complete.
The distinction between firearm and firearm parts is
necessary in that firearm parts often are replaced or modified. For example,
regular shooters eventually have to replace their rifles’ barrels, which simply
wear out. Buying a new barrel for an old rifle is not the same as buying a
whole new rifle, legally or practically. Likewise, some shooters will change
the stocks or “furniture” on their weapons, change the grips or sights, upgrade
certain mechanical parts (especially triggers), etc. At its simplest, a firearm
is just a length of pipe that is closed at one end. Because it would be
impractical to classify all of these the various parts as firearms under
federal law, a more sophisticated distinction has to be made.
A gray area — and here I mean a political gray
area; the law at this time is reasonably clear — is the issue of receivers that
are sold incomplete. A receiver becomes a firearm under
federal law only when it has reached a certain stage of completion. Finishing
an unfinished receiver is not like snapping together LEGO bricks — it usually
requires some basic machining equipment and skills, though in some cases 3D
printing can be used as a workaround. A firearm made from an unfinished
receiver, like one made entirely from scratch, never has to go through the
background check required by a retail sale, because, as far as federal law is
concerned, there never was a retail sale of a firearm at all — only the sale of
some firearm parts that were used in the production of a homemade firearm.
These homemade guns, which do not have serial numbers and
which require no background check to acquire, are what is meant — purportedly
meant, anyway — by the scary-sounding and imprecise term “ghost guns,” the
latest terror totem of the anti-gun lobby. I write purportedly because
many of the firearms reported as “ghost guns” are not homemade firearms at all
but ordinary commercially sold firearms that have had their serial numbers
removed or obscured. As often is the case when it comes to crime in the United
States, good national data are difficult to find because of inconsistent
reporting practices across jurisdictions.
When I first started reading about the upsurge in “ghost
guns,” my first thought was to wonder why a criminal would go to the trouble of
relying on a process that involves drill presses and mechanical skill rather
than do what U.S. criminals have been doing for generations; i.e., using stolen
guns or guns bought in criminal transactions. As it turns out, that is pretty
much what our criminals are still doing, though some cities and states report
significant increases in ghost-gun seizures. There have been a few murders
involving ghost guns, and those cases predictably have received a
disproportionate amount of attention. To give you an idea of the situation on
the ground, the gun-control group Everytown conducted a review of federal
“ghost gun” cases — 114 of them over a decade, a number that should tell you
something — and found that there were 2,513 such firearms connected to criminal
activity. But — and these are Everytown’s findings, not mine — the crime
associated with those 2,513 firearms was illegal manufacturing or dealing in
2,200 cases, not robbery or murder or assault. Put another way, almost all of
the crimes associated with so-called ghost guns were, in Everytown’s review of
the data, the crime of simply possessing such a weapon in the first place or
selling one.
That is not surprising. Consider a point of comparison:
Contrary to what many people think, it is legal to own a fully automatic weapon
in the United States, provided it was manufactured before 1986, though the
process of acquiring one is closely regulated and the supply of such weapons is
relatively small. Almost all of the crimes associated with legally owned fully
automatic weapons in the United States are violations of firearms regulations.
The number of murders committed with legally owned fully automatic weapons in
the United States in the past 80 years or so could be counted on your fingers.
(And, in every case that I have found, those crimes were committed not by
civilian owners of machine guns but by police and military personnel using
service weapons. It is possible I have missed one or two.) The same is true for
many other exotic armaments and accessories, such as sound suppressors, which
also are legal to own and increasingly common, especially among the very busy
hunters working to keep the feral hog population under control here in Texas.
(The fear of “silencers” is a largely American thing
probably driven by Hollywood; in many European countries, suppressors are sold
over the counter, and some European firing ranges go as far as to require them
as a courtesy to other shooters. I envy this every time I am at the range next
to a guy firing a .458 Winchester magnum rifle with a muzzle brake, a device
that reduces recoil but makes a firearm about twice as loud. Apparently, my
corner of Texas is rife with guys who are dealing with problem elephants.)
For most periods in U.S. history — and ours is no
different — the most common firearm used in a crime is whatever the most common
handgun of the day happens to be: A generation or two ago, it was .38
revolvers, and now it is 9mm pistols. We spend a great deal of time (and
political energy) worrying about so-called assault rifles, which are used in
murders only exceedingly rarely — all rifles put together, from AR-type
firearms to Elmer Fudd deer rifles, account for about 3 percent of the firearms
used in murders. We also are for some (probably cinematic) reason preoccupied
with particular unusual weapons that are seldom if ever used in violent crimes:
For example, California went bananas a few years ago over .50-caliber rifles,
which are now banned in the state. I have been able to find no case in which a
.50-caliber rifle was used in a murder in California, and their use in violent
crimes is pretty rare everywhere else. (Don’t take my word: Check
the Violence Policy Center’s review.) There is a pretty good reason for
that, of course: There’s a very nice .50-caliber rifle on the shelf of my local
firearms dealer — it is almost six feet long, weighs almost 50 pounds, and
costs $13,000.
The more you know about the ballistic facts on the
ground, the sillier these scaremongering stories sound. The anti-gun lobby
talks in fearful terms about the so-called military-style rifles available to
the American buying public, but there are some pretty common hunting rifles
that fire cartridges that are five to six times as
powerful as the standard 5.56mm used in AR-pattern rifles. This makes perfect
sense when you consider that it takes a lot more oomph to kill a Cape buffalo
or a bull elk than it does to kill a Russian, which is what the 5.56mm round
was designed to do. (Hence its full formal name, 5.56×45mm NATO.) The
gun-grabbers who proclaim that they have no interest in taking away granddad’s
deer rifle are being pretty silly, from an empirical point of view.
The supposed allure of “ghost guns” is that they are
“untraceable.” Which they are — like pretty much every other firearm in the
United States. We do not maintain a national gun registry, and, in spite of
what you see on television, there isn’t really any such thing as a “registered”
or “unregistered” firearm as a matter of federal law and the laws of almost all
the states. When police find a firearm that they believe to have been used in a
crime, they can, if they choose, consult federal records that will show them
which federally licensed firearms dealer sold that gun. Criminals are not as a
class of people very intelligent, but even so there are not very many who: (1)
are eligible to buy a gun legally from a dealer; (2) actually do so; and (3)
leave that gun at the scene of a crime. But that is the only way in most cases
that government records could be used to trace a gun from a crime scene to its
owner. (Most cases: A couple of states maintain legally questionable databases
that might provide more information.) Most firearms change hands at least once
— and often several times — before they end up at a crime scene or in the hands
of investigators. The thing about career criminals is — they’re career
criminals. They don’t buy criminal implements from federally regulated
providers. In many cases, they can’t: A large share of our murders are
committed by people who already have at least one felony conviction.
Once you start looking at the statistics, you’ll notice a
lot of small percentages and weak correlations — a tiny share of “assault rifles”
used in murders, Hollywood-style machine guns practically nowhere in evidence,
“ghost guns” more common than I would have expected (9 percent of the firearms
confiscated by police in Philadelphia, for example) but still pretty rare, etc.
Where you will see much stronger correlations is in who
is shooting the guns: About 90 percent of murder suspects in cities such as
New York and Chicago have prior
arrest histories; in Charlotte, half of
the murder suspects have had prior gun charges dismissed, which is a
genuine scandal; the No. 1 thing people being convicted of violent felonies
have in common is a prior arrest for a violent felony, which is the
case for two-thirds of violent felons.
(For context, be aware that the majority of murder
victims are criminal offenders, too, a finding that has held true in the big
cities for half
a century. A 2012 survey of New York murder victims found that 20 percent
of them were on probation or parole or had an active arrest warrant, 10 percent
were confirmed gang members, 71 percent had prior arrests, etc. Only one in
five male murder victims in New York did not have a prior
arrest.)
If prior offenders make up 90 percent of our murderers,
and “ghost guns” are involved in less than 1 percent of our murders, why are we
concentrating on the “ghost guns” rather than on the murderers?
The tripartite answer is politics, theater, and cowardice.
No comments:
Post a Comment