Homemade guns have been around since before the United States was a country, but gun control advocates refer to them today as “ghost guns.” VanDerStok v. Garland, which the Supreme Court will hear today, challenges Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) regulations that mandate serial numbers on all gun parts.
With each part having a different serial number, transferring a barrel from one gun to another requires you to redo the paperwork for both guns.
What was already a difficult case for the Biden-Harris administration became even more challenging when they admitted making a major error in their earlier filing to the Supreme Court. The administration originally claimed there has been no change in the rules and insists they’ve followed the same procedures for decades. The government argued the ATF reclassified a product as a firearm because the manufacturer had altered it. However, the government now admits that the ATF issued a 2022 statement acknowledging that the product hadn’t changed and the Biden-Harris administration laws knew this. After VanDerStok’s legal team pointed out this false statement, the government notified the Supreme Court about their error. And the government were then caught making additional false claims when they tried to offer a new explanation.
These mistakes are a major embarrassment.
But there are other false claims in the Biden-Harris administration’s brief. It is basing its case on the unfounded assertion that ghost guns “endanger the public and thwart efforts to prevent and solve serious crimes.” Repeatedly, the government briefs refer to the “grave threat to public safety” posed by ghost guns.
"When police officers retrieve a gun at a crime scene, they can trace it to the buyer and consider him as a suspect,” argues a brief from the Biden-Harris administration. “It will help to ensure that law enforcement officers can retrieve the information they need to solve crimes.
The ghost gun serial number rules are part of a pattern from the Biden-Harris administration, which has gotten Bank of America to turn over customer gun purchase data to the FBI without a warrant or probable cause, created a digital database containing almost a billion firearm transactions, and used the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act to implement background checks on all private gun transfers. The government wants to track virtually everyone who legally obtains a gun.
The ghost gun rule imposes significant costs on gun dealers and manufacturers and raises the risk of paperwork mistakes. Coupled with Biden-Harris’s zero-tolerance policy for any paperwork errors, no matter how trivial and inconsequential, which had already forced thousands of licensed dealers out of business by last year, this rule appears especially harmful. Biden-Harris aim to shut down gun dealers for any paperwork mistake, no matter how minor or insignificant the mistake.
However, even if homemade guns had serial numbers, it still wouldn’t help law enforcement to solve crimes. TV shows like Law & Order don't reflect how things work in reality.
In theory, police can trace weapons back to criminals by using serial numbers from registered guns left at crime scenes.
In real life, gunmen virtually only leave firearms at a crime scene when they are seriously injured or killed. In these cases, with both the criminal and weapon at the scene, police can solve the crime without needing gun registration. On the rare occasions when criminals do leave registered guns behind, those guns are typically not registered to the actual perpetrator.
We have tried registration systems for decades but haven’t identified any crimes that these systems have helped solve.
In a 2013 deposition in the case District of Columbia v. Heller II, the Washington, D.C. police chief couldn’t recall any specific case of registration records helping to identify who committed a crime, aside from possession offenses.
In 2000, Honolulu’s police chief testified before the Hawaii State Senate, stating that despite reviewing records since gun registration and licensing began in 1960, he couldn’t find any crimes solved through registration regulations. The police chief said that his officers spent around 50,000 hours each year registering and licensing guns. This time could have been better spent on proven, traditional law enforcement tasks.
Maryland and New York spent many tens of millions of dollars compiling a computer database registering guns and containing the ballistic “fingerprints” of every gun sold over a 15-year period. Despite these states strongly favoring gun control, even they eventually abolished their systems because they failed to solve a single crime.
In 2010, Canada examined its registration and licensing program. But the Royal Canadian Mounted Police couldn't identify any cases where registration was necessary to solve the crime.
Technology is also making the production of guns even more difficult to regulate. With 3D metal printers, people can now make weapons that are indistinguishable from those purchased in stores.
As Justice Kavanaugh pointed out in a 2011 dissent while he was on the D.C. Circuit Court, there is no historical backing for registration requirements. Kavanaugh noted that only seven states have relatively recently required registration for some firearms.
Democrats keep pushing a policy with high costs and no crime-reducing benefits. Registration is only useful for confiscating guns. Australia, Canada, and the U.K. are among the governments that used registration to confiscate guns. California, Chicago, and Washington, D.C. used it to know who the legal gun owners were before banning certain types of guns.
Kamala Harris enthusiastically called for gun confiscations during the 2020 presidential campaign. She was even happy to use executive actions if necessary. But with a national gun registry and possible retirements of conservative Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito being 80 and 78, respectively, at the end of the next administration, even without packing the court, her threat to confiscate guns is much more credible.
John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center and he lives in Missoula. He served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Legal Policy at the Justice Department.