It ought to be hard to believe — but, alas, it’s not — that with the border disintegrating and with it our security and sovereignty, the Biden administration and Washington Democrats are prioritizing . . . yes . . . wait for it . . . ghost guns!
I had the chance to discuss this on Fox News this morning with Dana Perino and Bill Hemmer. “Ghost gun” is the term applied to a firearm that is DYI-assembled from components often sold in a kit. The anti-gun folk are alarmed about ghost guns because they don’t have serial numbers and thus can’t be traced. (Charlie Cooke and Robert verBruggen had insightful posts on this topic about a year ago.)
The administration’s ghost-gun push is anti-gun theater that will have utterly nothing to do with tamping down violent crime.
The problem with guns from a crime perspective is how they’re used by criminals, not how they’re registered by everybody else. Before there were ghost guns, it was typical in violent-crime investigations for police to seize firearms with obliterated serial numbers. Or, when cops found guns that had serial numbers and were properly registered, they had nevertheless been stolen or otherwise illegally procured by the criminal. That is to say, the record-keeping attendments of gun ownership in the United States neither prevented the violent crime nor much advanced many investigations in which guns were recovered.
You would think from the way the press cover guns and Washington Democrats wail about them that there were some great federal interest in them. Other than protecting the right of citizens to bear arms for their defense, however, the Constitution has nothing to say about them. Firearms regulation, like most law-enforcement matters, is supposed to be the bailiwick of the states. (See David’s excellent post on how Biden’s model state in this regard is, of course, California.)
By the familiar extravagant reading of the commerce clause, the feds invented a role for themselves not only to regulate the cross-border shipment of guns but also to regulate — and in some instances, criminalize — their use. Federal gun laws do not have much impact on violent crime, however, and as Kevin has pointed out a number of times, the feds’ determination to proliferate the number of gun laws is curious in light of their lack of interest in enforcing the laws already on the books.
Reporting says that when the Biden Justice Department finally finishes writing its long-in-the-making rules on ghost guns, the administration expects stiff resistance from Republicans and Second Amendment activists. I’d defer to Charlie on the prospects of litigation. My instinctive objection to this stuff is that Congress delegates way too much authority to the executive branch to enact regulations in lieu of legislation. Most of this regulation addles law-abiding citizens far more than it impedes criminals. If Democrats want it, they should take accountable votes in Congress, not slough it off on the bureaucracy.
That said, there’s plenty of law for the proposition that the federal government may impose manufacturing requirements, such as serial numbers, to make firearms easier to register and trace. I doubt the coming court challenges will come to much.
What I would say with confidence is that this will have zero impact on crime. Democrats want to pretend this theater, which they are hot to perform because it appeases progressive activists, is an anti-crime measure. Not in any realistic way. What would have an impact on crime would be pro-active policing, whereby cops are (a) deployed to the places that their intelligence databases and statistical surveys tell them crime is spiking, and (b) infiltrate and otherwise intensify enforcement against gangs, which is what drive violent crime in urban areas.
Democrats resist doing this because they are race-obsessed. African Americans are complicit in gang activity and violent crime in percentages that significantly outstrip their percentage of the population. Stepped-up anti-gang enforcement inevitably entails more arrests and prosecutions of black suspects. Progressives, relying on their disparate-impact voodoo, inevitably carp that such law-enforcement priorities show that police and the judicial process are systemically racist — rather than grappling with the hard truth that blacks are offending at disproportionately high rates. This does no one any favors because predominantly black communities are victimized by crime at disproportionately high rates.
As with the southern border, Washington does not want to do anything meaningful about that very real challenge to our security and the rule of law. And so . . . we get the big push on ghost guns. Feel safer now?