President Joe Biden recently announced a slew of new gun control proposals including a highly controversial set of rules regarding split receivers and a new set of guidelines regarding unserialized firearms. The gun control lobby praised these new regulation and the Biden administration for this big win, but now, many are already claiming that these new rules are a total flop.
Vice Magazine, a leftist publication, recently ran a piece titled “Biden’s New Ghost Gun Rules Will Have ‘Zero Effect,’ Experts Say“. In this piece they lay out why exactly these new regulations do little to nothing in regards to reducing crime or the proliferation of unserialized firearms.
As Vice reports:
As Biden put it: “If you buy a couch you have to assemble, it’s still a couch. If you order a package like this one over here that includes the parts you need… you bought a gun.”
But without a major change in federal law, several experts told VICE News, anyone who wants to build an untraceable ghost gun will have little trouble acquiring the necessary parts, even after Biden’s new rules are enforced in the coming months.
“It’s going to have zero effect,” said Rick Vasquez, former chief of the ATF’s Firearms Technology Branch, who now works as a private consultant. Vasquez said the firearms industry has anticipated the changes for over a year and adapted by limiting the sale of kits with “readily assembled” components, which going forward will be regulated like other firearms.
But Vasquez says the rules won’t stop dealers from selling individual unfinished parts, or prevent private citizens from using a 3D-printer to make an unserialized, untraceable Glock-type pistol or AR-style rifle (among the most common models of ghost guns) in their living room.
Rick Vasquez is right regarding the industry anticipating this change, many companies no longer sell unfinished frames alongside the parts needed to convert the frame into a functioning component and almost no one is selling full kits anymore.
A major issue in this article, as with many on the topic of “Ghost Guns”, is the recurring theme of unserialized firearms being untraceable. This is would imply that regular firearms purchased through legitimate means are traceable. It is almost as if these indidvuals are under the impression that a firearm purchased from a gun store and later used in a crime can be traced directly back to the original purchaser, this is only the case when the firearm is recovered from the scene of a crime and that often isn’t the case in America. In the event a firearm is recovered from the scene of a crime and the original buyer is located, there is a great deal of plausible deniability for the original buyer.
Another thing to take note of here is all this talk about 3D printers. We are quickly approaching the point where an everyday 3D printer and moderately priced filimanet can in fact print a handgun frame, high end printers and filaments can already do this but not some cheap junk from Amazon. After this point is reached there really isn’t anything that the government can do regarding unserialized firearms, at that point anyone with a minor amount of computer knowhow and some spare change can make a gun in their home.
