In his latest effort to pretend he is doing something about skyrocketing crime rates, President Joe Biden rolled out his new rule on so-called ghost guns this week. In doing so, he peddled a number of anti-gun cliches and silly comments.
For example, he stated, “You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment passed.” First of all, this is not even true — as of this writing, we cannot find a law from that era banning the purchase of cannons. But more importantly, it is irrelevant to discussions about guns. There has never been a Second Amendment right to keep or bear artillery, land mines, bombs, tanks, nukes, or any other weapons that do not meet the legal and contextual definition of “arms” — i.e., melee or projectile weapons that individuals can wear on their person and carry.
Biden also asserted that 20,000 “suspected ghost guns” are being recovered at crime scenes annually. This statement’s relevance depends upon the fallacy that the government has some business tracking who owns guns in the first place. But it is also misleading because the data do not suggest that homemade guns are being used in large numbers of crimes. Between 2016 and 2020, homemade firearms were used in less than 1% (0.36% to be exact) of all homicides. According to the FBI, most guns recovered at crime scenes are not home-printed but rather purchased on the black market (43%), stolen by the perpetrator (6%), acquired from friends or relatives (15%), purchased at retail (10%), or brought to the crime scene by someone other than the perpetrator (12%).
Like most gun-related things, the possibility of people 3D printing their own guns at home sounds scarier in theory than it is in real life. This is mostly the provenance of enthusiasts, not mass shooters or criminals. Importantly, it is already and always has been possible for criminals, including felons already barred from gun ownership, to get their hands on guns discreetly without police attention and without having to do the work of building them. No law has ever or could ever change this.
The advent of 3D printing and the consequent ease of home manufacture only makes the futility of gun control even more obvious than it was already. The government’s say over citizens owning guns was tenuous at best — now it is obviously nonexistent.
Indeed, Biden’s new ghost gun rule does not disappoint as an exercise in conspicuous futility. It barely scratches the surface of the build-at-home market. Gun-making hobbyists and kit-makers were expecting to fight something much more restrictive. This rule will require them to do slightly more work to make sure their builds are lawful.
All of this, however, is beside the point. The reason for the current spike in violent and property crime in Democratic-controlled cities has nothing to do with criminals running out en masse and buying 3D printers. The very notion is laughable. Rather, it has to do with weak Democratic prosecutors — mostly self-styled “progressives” who recently toppled less unreasonable Democratic predecessors in primaries. These district attorneys are failing to incarcerate dangerous career criminals who have already proven impervious to rehabilitation.
Between no-bail rules, failure to enforce laws against property crime, and the revolving door created by unwarranted reductions in charges even for serious and violent crimes, these “progressive prosecutors” have generated local crime waves so bad that they are affecting national statistics. San Francisco, which is not exactly known as a bastion of law-and-order conservatism, is on the verge of recalling its errant prosecutor, but many other places — Baltimore, northern Virginia, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Oakland — are afflicted with such incompetent ideologues who are making their cities unlivable. It doesn’t help that Biden’s Justice Department has literally pleaded with judges to let people off the hook for murder, at least for murder committed on social justice or “equity” grounds.
If Democrats were really worried about criminals getting guns, not just keen on waging a culture war against gun owners, they would not be focusing on the useless gun laws they keep proposing. First of all, they would stop obsessing over rifles, which FBI data show are very rarely used in crimes. In 2020, for example, handguns were used in roughly 20 times as many murders as rifles. If Democrats were serious, they would also prioritize strict enforcement of laws against illegal straw purchases of guns and support long sentences for straw purchasers — something that has seemingly never been tried in earnest. Finally, they would also support tough sentencing enhancements and mandatory minimum sentences for criminals for all offenses committed with firearms.
As with so many issues, Biden’s new push against an imaginary problem shows that he doesn’t understand the real-world problems people are facing. That’s why his approval ratings are where they are and why his party is preparing for the loss of its congressional majorities this fall.
