As we’ve noted since we started talking about the shooting this past weekend in Seattle, Washington state has embraced a ton of gun control laws in the last handful of years. Everytown ranks it in its top 10 states for gun laws, and none of that has seemed to matter one bit. This is important because, as we’ve also seen, officials were pretty quick to try and make it about the gun.
Honestly, they shouldn’t have done that.
After all, among the many anti-gun measures passed in the state is one banning privately made firearms, also known as “ghost guns.”
You know, the kind of firearms that are illegal to even make in the state, yet are what authorities say the 15-year-old suspect possessed.
The 15-year-old arrested after a shootout at food festival near Seattle’s Space Needle over the weekend was armed with a ghost gun with an extended magazine, police said Tuesday.
Police Chief Shon Barnes told a news conference that the weapon was a 9 mm gun from Polymer80 — a now-defunct company that was once a leading manufacturer of ghost gun parts.
Since this is a Polymer80 incomplete receiver, then this isn’t a case of a serial number being scratched out so it was unreadable. This is a privately made firearm.
Fair enough.
However, Polymer80 went out of business two years ago. Either this kid (allegedly) bought the kit when he was 13, or there’s some other manner in which it was obtained. It may have been lawfully built in another state, stolen, then trafficked to Washington, which is a possibility, or it could have been that someone got it specifically to become a black-market gun more than two years ago.
Either way, not only was it illegal for the kid to allegedly have a handgun in the first place, but it was illegal for him to have a handgun like this. Yet, we’re told that laws prohibiting so-called ghost guns are necessary because they keep guns out of criminal hands.
Really? How did that work out in Seattle?
The truth of the matter is that even without Polymer80 out there, so-called ghost guns are still a thing. They’ll always be a thing, simply because technology has marched onward and home manufacturing is far more accessible than it used to be.
3D printers get much of the press, but desktop CNC milling machines also exist, not unlike the Ghost Gunners from Defense Distributed. That one is designed for making guns, but that’s not to say that other devices can’t make them, and that’s important, because as the man in the movie said, “You can’t stop the signal.”
So, with that in mind, why keep making this about the guns? Why not ask what the hell a 15-year-old was doing running around, even thinking he “needed” a gun or was willing to use it during a food festival? Why not address the gang-based criminal subculture that believes any act of disrespect should be met with lethal force or else you’re something less than a real man?
Nope. The answer, I’m sure, will be sold to the people of Washington state as more gun control.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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