Are ghost guns as scary as they sound?

MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday the 19th of May, 2022.

You’re listening to today’s edition of The World and Everything in It and we’re so glad to have you along today! Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up: gun kits.

Owning a gun is legal in the United States. But the process for buying one involves a fair amount of regulation. The government tracks most gun sales and requires background checks on people buying them.

REICHARD: But that only applies to fully functioning guns. People who buy parts and build the guns themselves don’t face the same level of scrutiny. And the Biden administration says that’s a problem.

WORLD’s Josh Schumacher reports.

BIDEN: A felon, a terrorist, a domestic abuser could go from a gun kit to a gun in as little as 30 minutes.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, REPORTER: Last month, President Biden announced a new rule from the Department of Justice cracking down on so-called “ghost guns.”

BIDEN: When they show up at a crime scene, they can’t be traced. Harder to find or prove who used them. I mean you can’t connect the gun to the shooter and hold them accountable.

Gun kits include 80 percent of the key parts necessary to make a working gun. Because they’re not legally considered firearms, they aren’t subject to the same kind of regulation.

The new rule requires gun kit parts to have serial numbers, so they can be traced. And it mandates background checks for people buying them. The president says that will reduce the number of untraceable guns used in violent crime.

But gun rights advocates say the new rules won’t actually make Americans safer.

Trevor Burrus is a research fellow at the Cato Institute.

BURRUS: In reality, these guns, these so-called “ghost guns,” are not really being used as much as the administration is purporting to. And even if you made them disappear you're not going to functionally save almost any life.

According to the Biden administration, investigators recovered 20,000 “ghost guns” last year at crime scenes across the country. That’s a 10-fold increase since 2016. And that has law enforcement agencies from Boston to San Francisco worried.

But it still represents just a fraction of the total number of guns used in crimes last year. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms traced nearly 400,000 guns recovered by investigators in 2021. And that’s just the ones police turned over for tracing.

Trevor Burrus notes criminals rarely buy guns through legal channels. They steal them or buy them on the black market. Or, they use “straw purchases”—asking someone with no criminal record to get the gun for them.

Burrus says it’s almost impossible to regulate guns in a way that will prevent criminals from getting their hands on them.

BURRUS: There's just a lot of guns out there. And whatever we think about gun policy, that's a really important starting premise, because that's not going to change. It's just, it's probably about 400 million guns in the country, we have no idea how many guns there are. But you couldn't even, if you somehow eliminated half of those guns, you would still have an unbelievable amount of guns in this country.

And Burrus says the new rule doesn’t even focus on the type of firearm most often used in gun deaths.

BURRUS: If we're going to have a serious conversation about gun deaths in this country, and when I say gun deaths, I am including both suicides, which is about 60 percent of gun deaths in America, and interpersonal homicide, shooting of someone else. And almost all of those are committed with handguns.

The new rule is intended to make gun kits less appealing to criminals by making them traceable. But it places a high burden on gun manufacturers and sellers. Amy Swearer is a legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

SWEARER: That's going to be a whole lot of paperwork for any gun store, gunsmith, that gets one of these privately made un-serialized firearms, and then has to say, look, in order for me to take this, I've got to get it engraved, I've got to do all the paperwork on this. And then I've got to retain those records, you know, up until the day the store closes, whether it's tomorrow, or 10 years or 10 decades from now.

Gun sellers previously had to keep sales records for 20 years. Now, businesses have to keep them for as long as they’re in business. That adds up to a lot of records business can’t afford to lose.

SWEARER: It increases the likelihood that you're going to have, you know, otherwise lawful, well intentioned, peaceable gun sellers, who are now going to be hit over the head for infractions, because they couldn't afford to keep 12 stores worth of paper records over the course of, you know, six decades, sitting in their storage facility.

Cato’s Trevor Burrus says none of this will stop at-risk people and hardened criminals from getting their hands on firearms. He says that’s true of any law seeking to regulate guns directly.

The better option, Burrus says, would be to address the root causes of crime itself.

BURRUS: I think it'd be better to look at sort of social causes of crime, you have to ask why people commit crimes in the first place. Not trying to figure out, what is the gun that did the previous crime that was in the news, and then going after that gun, as if it will do anything to sort of save lives next time. Because it really won't.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.