California rampage puts spotlight on homemade 'ghost guns'

I found this which basically makes it illegal to "gift" a ghost gun. So it doesn't have to be a sale.

No, a license is not required to make a firearm solely for personal use. However, a license is required to manufacture firearms for sale or distribution. The law prohibits a person from assembling a non–sporting semiautomatic rifle or shotgun from 10 or more imported parts, as well as firearms that cannot be detected by metal detectors or x–ray machines. In addition, the making of an NFA firearm requires a tax payment and advance approval by ATF.

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So I suspect the law in CA will be changed to prohibit the manufacture of a ghost gun and some other states will follow.

Making five and selling four has legal parameters under ATF regulations. It is not illegal to make as many as you want, and it's not even illegal to sell them, what the ATF has to determine is if you are trying to sidestep getting a manufacturer's license. AFAIK there is no number or line in the sand which you cross - making X legal but X+1 illegal. They have the advantage as they only need to prove "intent" - which is where we wind up in court convincing a judge or jury.

However - same as in a courtroom but without ANY legal guidelines in regulations, when the news media whips out a story about "illegal ghost guns," they present the issues (not necessarily any facts at all) and then try you in the court of public opinion. And we are reading those results right in this thread. Comments made without being based on fact, law, or even logic (including the media and their reporting.)

What comes into play is the ATF requirements that a serial number be placed on firearms in a certain manner - but that language applies to a licensed manufacturer. You, or I, acting under the law making our own firearm are not required to do so. What happens is that years later, or so it's supposed, when we decide to dispose of that firearm, others will demand it be marked to satisfy their misunderstanding of commercial requirements which do not apply to us.

And this is the Constitutional issue, no different than making knives, which are highly regulated in other nations. Do we require numbers on them? We gave up the fight on motor vehicles in 1954, numbers are mandatory, and for some intents and purposes it does perform to the nature of how good laws are fashioned. VIN numbers help prevent "evil," ie chop shops, stolen cars, transfers of ownership to avoid debts, etc. Concerning guns, it can help, but by no means is it as effective - we don't publicly walk down the streets with them open exposed where we could see someone in possession of our stolen custom engraved 1911 with meteorite grips, scandium frame, and chased unobtanium slide. And our crime statistics reinforce that, most of the inner city shootings are with stolen guns from outside the metro. In point of fact, the serial number registration has about ZERO effectiveness in controlling gun theft whatsoever. All it can do is trace back to the physical maker and give a timestamp of when it was fabricated.

So the issue of "ghost guns" isn't really one of devious machinists trying to circumvent law so they can sell firearms to criminals - criminals only have so much money, it's easier to buy stolen guns sourced elsewhere at no cost at all. "Ghost guns" are just another scam that is Fake News, to provide another narrative for the public to push to control firearms by any means whatsoever, and that is only going to limit the freedoms of law abiding people, like you and me. The very few who would make a firearm from scratch - ostensibly an AR lower - can just take it another step further. Steel plates stacked up and bolted together are already on the market, and there is nothing to stop anyone who is in possession of one kit replicating it at the garage workshop level with hand tools and then selling the flats to one and all. Perfectly legal and going on right now (I need to order one of them kits) but take that with a grain of salt - in general, most unfinished lowers are more expensive than legally made one. Even polymer. That has been the general trend over the decade, not the Banic bumps of high demand. And that is another reason why they aren't the real source of the problem, and why there are so few reports or actual incidents of crime with ghost guns in the first place. Not to forget, the use of AR's is so limited that it's dumped in with "all other rifles" and even then that is a significantly small number of incidences in crime overall. We are talking a fraction of a fraction of a fraction when it comes down to ghost guns - one or two misuses in tens of thousands of guns misused in a year?

It's a non issue being blown completely out of proportion by the media and leftist enemies of our Constitution.

CoalTrain49 said:

I found this which basically makes it illegal to "gift" a ghost gun.

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Actually, no.

This is a little hard to grasp but it works like this:

The operative function under federal law is a "transfer." ANY movement of a firearm from one person to another is a transfer. Selling a gun is a transfer. Giving a gun is a transfer. Loaning a gun is a transfer. It's all a matter of possession. Not anything to do with who's name is on paperwork somewhere, i.e. who "owns" it.

Under federal law you may sell a gun as a private person. You may give a gun away as a private person. You may loan one to someone. You may sell, give, or loan a gun that you bought, or one that you made yourself. The origin of the gun doesn't matter. Transferring a gun you made to someone else is quite legal (under federal law).


What you may not do is be "in the business of" making guns for sale or distribution. You need a manufacturer's license (Type 7 FFL, most commonly) to do that. "Or distribution" in this case would cover any instance where someone might try to say they were making a guns for the purposes of giving them away (as sales incentives or whatever) and trying to make the case that they weren't acting as an unlicensed manufacturer because all those guns they made weren't sold for money, but given away as gifts or promotions.

The most important words in the quote you found is "for". "...a license is require to manufacture firearms FOR sale or distribution." Making a gun for yourself and then deciding to give it away (or sell it) later on is not against the law. Making guns FOR the purpose of selling or distributing them requires a license. In the end, it isn't all that complicated to understand the difference, though certainly there's grey area.*

Theoretically, if they had some reason to do so, a prosecutor could make the case that you were in the business of manufacturing guns for sale or distribution if you only sold or gave away one gun you'd made. But that's not what they're after. If they're trying to prosecute someone for being an unlicensed manufacturer, they're going to look for patterns of behavior, transaction receipts, correspondence establishing terms of trade or sale, etc.






* -- Grey area: It is perfectly legal to buy a firearm TO BE A GIFT. You can buy a firearm with the sole purpose for that purchase being that you will immediately give it to your pal Fred. That's 100% lawful. I believe, therefore, there is no reason you cannot build a firearm for the purpose of giving that firearm to you pal Fred as a personal gift. But I'm not 100% sure.

If you buy a lot of firearms and give them all away, you might end up in a situation where the ATF is looking through your affairs to see if a case can be made that you're violating laws on being a dealer. I imagine if you build a lot of guns and give them away you're going to run into the same issue, even faster.

hdwhit said:

But we don't need to. The ATF could probably tighten up on 80% receivers by refining the regulations under which they make the determination that something is or is not substantially complete.

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That would be really difficult to do, and the ATF wouldn't want to do it anyway. A vague "facts and circumstances" test serves its purposes better, since each such case has to be litigated on its own.

That "80%" rubric means nothing. 80% of the total machining time? Machining time depends on the skill of the operator, and the equipment available. At least one court case held that a receiver is a "gun" if it can be completed in 8 hours or less in a fully equipped machine shop, but I believe that ruling is an outlier. After all, a gun can be built from scratch (bar stock) in 8 hours in a fully equipped machine shop.

444 said:

Only superficially related to the topic but.............. I remember reading a long running thread years ago on a gun forum; possibly this one. Written by a guy in Argentina who discussed what it was like to live in a place that suffered a total breakdown of their economy/society. A real SHTF scenario. One of the things that I found interesting is that it was illegal to own a gun. But, a large number of people owned guns. Since it was illegal for them to own a gun, they figured what the heck and most of them had submachine guns. After all, if you are going to get punished for breaking the law, you might as well go all out.

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That's exactly the situation today in Greece. Rifles -- not to mention machine guns -- are illegal for private possession, but the country is awash with AK-47's and other automatic arms. The Greek police estimate that 250,000 Kalashnikovs came in from neighboring Albania after the fall of the Communist regime there. And that was on top of thousands of illegal guns left over from WW2. The fact is, even with the most draconian laws, it's impossible to prevent people from getting guns if they really want them. Especially in countries that had lots of weapons in circulation before the crackdown.

All that so-called "airtight" gun control schemes do is drive guns underground -- thereby, by definition, increasing criminal guns. It's better to provide a safety valve so that gun ownership is legal and open. It's a serious policy blunder to make guns the monopoly of the criminals.

AlexanderA said:

It's a serious policy blunder to make guns the monopoly of the criminals.

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I think you could look at Mexico to see that. A small caliber pistol or revolver in ones home is all that is allowed. No carry. Rifles and shotguns if you belong to a club. Permits to transport are required.

So the cartels and the military are the only ones with any semi-auto rifles. The military doesn't exactly keep a tight grip on the cartels either.

There is even a simpler way--a few companies make the polymer mix and molds to complete an AR lower. If I recall right, one kit includes metal reinforcing pieces for the buffer tube attachment and enough polymer mix to cast five receivers. Technically, this is a zero percent lower until poured and cured. I am guessing that you might have to remove mold flashing and the like but as someone noted above--it is more expensive than buying $30 Anderson lowers on sale.

CoalTrain49, regarding Mexico, the largest source of cartel firearms used to be via Uncle Sam's military and police assistance buying U.S. firearms transferring them to the Mexican authorities which then corrupt military and police sold to the cartels (or in the case of the Zero's--simply walked off the job with the Mexican military with their rifles and such). Not sure about the current situation but a lot of that came out in wake of the Fast and Furious debacle.

CoalTrain49 said:

So I suspect the law in CA will be changed to prohibit the manufacture of a ghost gun and some other states will follow.

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The current governor has vetoed that once or twice already but signed that all firearm must have a serial number.

The next governor (like Hilary, will take a miracle to be defeated) is, by far, worse than than current one.

ETA: I probably shouldn't have said vetoed. It may have been that he just didn't sign them.

boom boom said:

CoalTrain49, regarding Mexico, the largest source of cartel firearms used to be via Uncle Sam's military and police assistance buying U.S. firearms transferring them to the Mexican authorities which then corrupt military and police sold to the cartels (or in the case of the Zero's--simply walked off the job with the Mexican military with their rifles and such). Not sure about the current situation but a lot of that came out in wake of the Fast and Furious debacle.

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Yeah, that's pretty amazing. Lots of semi-auto rifles in Mexico. I don't think the police even bother with pistols anymore. Didn't see a single one when I was in Sonora or Chihuahua..

Trunk Monkey said:

There was a thread started in July of this yea by a member named Tark who possess the skills and equipment to make a gun from scratch.

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I know that guy !!! He's an idiot !!! Lol.

Yes, there are a lot of guys on this forum whose skills far exceed mine when it comes to turning blocks of steel into guns. The guns I made were simple single shot copies of a Remington rolling block.

CoalTrain49 said:

I found this which basically makes it illegal to "gift" a ghost gun. So it doesn't have to be a sale.



So I suspect the law in CA will be changed to prohibit the manufacture of a ghost gun and some other states will follow.

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What is easier, building a gun with a 80% lower or stealing one? Building one is not that hard but it does require advanced knowledge about the gun you are building. I doubt most criminals are reading manuals on gunsmithing. I gotta believe most criminals will continue to go the easy way and use stolen guns.

tark said:

I know that guy !!! He's an idiot !!! Lol.

Yes, there are a lot of guys on this forum whose skills far exceed mine when it comes to turning blocks of steel into guns. The guns I made were simple single shot copies of a Remington rolling block.

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There used to be a Moderator that made 2 1911s from the billet

The Bureau of Justice Statistics periodically conducts surveys of large representative samples of state and federal prison inmates, asking firearms using offenders the sources for the guns they carried.

It might be interesting if the next survey asked criminals if the weapons they obtained from Family/Friends, Street/Illegal Source, or Other were "home-built". I suspect that the proportion of home-built is not very high in the overall Big Picture.

The years of the inmate surveys are 1991, 1997 and 2004.
1994 The Brady Act waiting period to allow local CLEO BG checks started.
Nov 1998 The NICS check for FFL dealer sales on a 4473 transfer kicked in, replacing the Brady waiting period and CLEO check.

There has been a decline in Retail sources cited by criminals with the increase in Other which is primarily declined -to-answer or not-specified. From thefirst criminal gun source survey about 1985, it appears the sources on the questionaire were pretty much set. The Other category might be interesting, if there could be a breakdown.

But if we could only get the family and friends of felons, gun thieves and burglars, drug dealers, street dealers, fences and black marketeers to run Universal Background Checks like the FFLs we might get somewhere.

Or we could end up like the Alcohol Prohibition era, Retail Sales 0%, Bootleg 100%.

Carl N. Brown said:

But if we could only get the family and friends of felons, gun thieves and burglars, drug dealers, street dealers, fences and black marketeers to run Universal Background Checks like the FFLs we might get somewhere.

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That's pretty funny.

They could all just go to the local FFL, pay for the background check and everyone would be happy.

Here in WA it's illegal to transfer a firearm without a background check. That came about a few years ago thru a ballot initiative. Lots of people here thought it was a good idea. I'm wondering if all the criminals who commit crimes with firearms in this state now understand that they have to get a background check before they can use that firearm to commit a crime.

All that new law did was give FFL's an added source of income and swamp the DOL with additional data entry work. I'm not sure if they were able to get additional funding to hire a consultant to do that work or not, but they asked.

The new law is politically unpopular so the legislature just doesn't fund the requests. They have better things to spend the taxpayers dollars on, like roads and bridges that are falling apart.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/dec/18/washington-state-gun-database-lacks-info-on-thousa/

Carl N. Brown said:

The Bureau of Justice Statistics periodically conducts surveys of large representative samples of state and federal prison inmates, asking firearms using offenders the sources for the guns they carried.

Code:

Firearms Using Offenders
(inmates who carried or used a firearm in the offense for which they were imprisoned)
Source of firearms possessed by state prison inmates at time of offense.
Source of firearm          1991  1997  2004
Retail Purchase or trade   20.8% 14.0% 11.3%
- Retail store             14.7   8.2   7.3
- Pawnshop                  4.2   4.0   2.6
- Flea market               1.3   1.0   0.6
- Gun show                  0.6   0.8   0.8
Family or friend*          33.8% 40.1% 37.4%
- Purchased or traded      13.5  12.6  12.2
- Rented or borrowed       10.1  18.9  14.1
- Other                    10.2   8.5  11.1
Street/illegal source      40.8% 37.3% 40.0%
- Theft or burglary        10.5   9.1   7.5
- Drug dealer/off street   22.5  20.3  25.2
- Fence/black market        7.8   8.0   7.4
Other                       4.6%  8.7% 11.2%
* Wright and Rossi "Armed and Considered Dangerous" noted that friend or family of a prison inmate who is a Firearms Using Offender are often criminals themselves or at least aid, abet or associate with a criminal.

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I'm curious where "met a guy I found on Armslist" fits into that list

Carl N. Brown said:

Or we could end up like the Alcohol Prohibition era, Retail Sales 0%, Bootleg 100%.

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You could get a prescription for "Medicinal" whisky during prohibition.

This is how a black market explodes, overregulation borne from desire to control everyone and everything (reminds me of the pharisees). A danger here is that the general population gets trained to casually ignore the law in general which puts us right on track to becoming another 3rd world ....hole.

Irish Democracy explained here.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428218/limits-irish-democracy-kevin-d-williamson

They have so many onerous laws in CA it's a wonder anyone pays any attention to any of them.

I once took a shooting class at one of the big name shooting schools and one of the students was a Mexican national, young guy who obviously came from a wealthy family. I had a conversation with him about gun laws in Mexico and he had a hard time putting into words how the laws in Mexico were just sort of suggestions or they just applied to certain people and all that. It was all relative. Yes, it might be illegal, but it might just be ignored by everyone involved, or it might be ignored if you knew the right people, or it might be ignored if you were of a certain social class, or it might be ignored if you paid someone off, or it might not be enforced depending on where you lived......................................... In any case, the fact that something was illegal didn't nessessarily mean you didn't do it openly.

Not to say that doesn't go on in the US to some degree. But typically in the US, you have to be a very special person to have felony type things swept under the rug.

It was all very interesting to me.

We had a pastor from cuba come visit our church for a short while after Cuba sort of opened up. When asked what he thought about the US his response was roughly... that people here obeyed the law. I found that pretty enlightening.

CoalTrain49 said:

Irish Democracy explained here.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/428218/limits-irish-democracy-kevin-d-williamson

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Thanks for the citation. This is a must-read. Here's the main take-away:


That's the crux of the so-called "gun issue." It's not about guns; it's really about a cultural conflict: the hyper-educated urban elites, academia, and the media against those they perceive to be "rednecks" and to be generally beneath them. This is not a right-left divide; it's more a class divide.

Unfortunately, simply quoting the words of the 2nd Amendment is almost irrelevant in this debate. I'm pessimistic that the growing societal fissures can be dealt with in constitutional terms. They go far deeper than the constitution.

444 said:

Anybody can make a gun from scratch.

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I think "make a gun from scratch" needs to be clarified. It does not mean buying a bunch of pre-manufactured parts, doing a little machining of an 80% receiver, slapping the thing together and calling it a gun.

It means taking a solid, 2X4X12" 18 pound block of 4140, spending hundreds of hours machining it into workable parts and then assembling those hand made parts into a functioning firearm. It means buying a pre-manufactured barrel and some screws and a spring or two. Everything else Is carved from steel. It also means making your own stock and rust blueing the thing in your kitchen. It means putting all of those hundreds of hours on the line by proof testing your creation with an 85,000 PSI proof round marked 7.62 X 63 MM, because it was given to me by one of out German customers. It means feeling the pride one has in knowing that he did it. His creation survived and has digested hundreds of 30-06 factory rounds.

Anybody can do it? I think not.

IF we are talking about the gun YOU envision, then you are right.

However, ANYBODY can build A gun.
Read what you quoted me as saying: anybody can build a gun from scratch.


Look up zip gun.
Pipe
Nail
Rubber band

There is nothing complicated or sophisticated about making A gun.

The point here that you obviously missed is that all the legislation does NOTHING to eliminate guns. Anybody can make one. It may not be nice. It may not be the equal of what we can buy today in a store. It isn't the equal of some finely crafted work of art. But it will fire a bullet and it IS a gun. And nothing the government can do, can stop it.

444 said:

The point here that you obviously missed is that all the legislation does NOTHING to eliminate guns. Anybody can make one. It may not be nice. It may not be the equal of what we can buy today in a store. It isn't the equal of some finely crafted work of art. But it will fire a bullet and it IS a gun. And nothing the government can do, can stop it.

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I agree completely that all this antigun legislation will do nothing to eliminate guns.

However, we may be wrongly assuming that the goal of the antigunners is to eliminate guns. The more savvy of them know that this is impossible.

No, their goal is to drive the gun culture underground, and criminalize a whole class of people (gun owners) that they consider to be "rednecks," "deplorables," and generally undesirable in their utopian world order. In this they might well succeed. In the end it's all about people control and not "gun control."

Your guns might not be physically destroyed or confiscated, but what good would they do you if they could never see the light of day, and if your own children might turn you into the authorities for having them?

"They" are certainty trying in various cities and states to incrementally eliminate guns. If "they" thought they could get away with it, they would be more than happy to attempt to legislate guns out of existence.

However, I hear what you are saying. Its one possible narrative. I don't nesessarily completely buy into it , but I am smelling what you are stepping in. It's possible.

Am I the only one who thinks many of these mass shootings are contrived?
The shooter's motives, lately, have been sketchy, at best. They just seem
tailor-made for media frenzy, is all.

Is the use of a ghost gun, in California, in a rampage shooting, now, just
a fantastic coincidence?

444 said:

"They" are certainty trying in various cities and states to incrementally eliminate guns. If "they" thought they could get away with it, they would be more than happy to attempt to legislate guns out of existence.

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I'm not saying that the antigunners won't try to eliminate guns. However, even they know that an airtight gun-free system isn't possible. Their strategy is to make the guns nominally illegal so as to drive them underground. That would kill the open gun culture that currently reinforces and promotes gun ownership. Thereafter, it would take several generations of attrition until guns were entirely eliminated as a factor in society. At least I think this is their plan.

The countervailing scenario is that making guns illegal would have the opposite effect, promoting a thriving underground black market controlled by criminals (exactly like what Prohibition did to the alcohol market). If it followed that pattern, gun control would eventually be seen as a failed social experiment (but not before enormous social damage had been done).

The gun control movement can be likened to the movement to abolish slavery, or to the movement to rid the country of alcohol. (Take your pick as to the likelihood of success, and the consequences -- one movement was successful, and the other was a failure.) All these movements -- slavery abolition, alcohol prohibition, and gun control/abolition -- have their roots in the exact same "reform" mentality (which in turn is motivated by a self-assured sense of morality). In other words, these were/are moral crusades. Their proponents were/are not loath to change the Constitution in order to get their way. Therefore, blind reliance on the 2nd Amendment alone may not be enough to save gun rights in the long run. The controllers are going to try to find ways to eviscerate and then eliminate the Amendment.