The Media’s Unhinged Take on ‘Ghost Guns’ Continue

I’m really sick of talking about unserialized firearms. The murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has made them a main topic of discussion among the mainstream media since the alleged killer was found with just such a gun–one with a printed receiver and other components made from a kit.

I’m sick of it mostly because the media that’s trying to gin up hysteria about these firearms gets so much wrong about it.

Let’s take this piece from The Week, as an example.

The shocking broad-daylight shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Dec. 4 was carried out with a homemade firearm that alleged shooter Luigi Mangione may have created with a 3D printer. The increasing use of such weapons, often called “ghost guns,” has raised troubling new questions about the easy availability of homemade firearms and the challenges they pose to both public safety and the ability of law enforcement to solve crimes.

How do ghost guns work?

Ghost guns are “firearms that are privately assembled and untraceable,” said NPR. Some are created more or less from scratch using 3D printers, and others are sold as partially assembled “kits” to individuals, to avoid assigning the weapon a traceable serial number. That’s because the individual components of a gun “are not subject to any of the federal regulations that govern firearms sales,” including background checks, said PBS News.

That’s because federal law specifically defines the receiver as “the gun” and everything else as a simple gun part. These firearms, though, use things like 3D printing or desktop CNC machines like the Ghost Gunner to create the receiver. You’re not buying the gun, you’re buying parts for the gun.

I will give this writer credit for acknowledging that kits aren’t actually needed in this day and age. Far too few of his peers seem to understand that, so credit where it’s due.

Moving on…

In fact, anyone can now buy a small 3D printer for under $200 online and use it to create everything from guns to food. And the “vast majority of people assembling a ghost gun are legally allowed to do so,” said CBS Philadelphia. That means that this type of ghost gun is increasingly “falling into the hands of individuals who should not have access to them, including young people and violent extremists,” said The Soufan Center.

First, no, a $200 printer off of Amazon will not print you food. That’s a potential use for a 3D printer down the road, as the included link makes pretty damn clear. You can’t do that right here and now.

I’m looking forward to that capability existing, mind you, because at that point, we’re just a step closer to the replicators from Star Trek, but it doesn’t yet.

However, the big thing that bothers me is that saying that because most people making “ghost guns” are legally allowed to do so, that automatically means these types of guns are going to fall into the hands of those who can’t lawfully own a gun. It displays either a fundamental misunderstanding of what is going on here or is a willful misdirection of what actually happens.

Anyone who intends to make a 3D-printed gun for sale is breaking the law the moment they start printing. They’re not actually allowed to do any such thing, so if they’re putting those guns in the hands of criminals or kids, they’re breaking the law from the start.

See, “there’s no law specifically prohibiting everyone from doing this” is a far cry from “the law allows everyone to do this for any reason.”

Yet this is a lot of what we see from the media. They’re big on amplifying the so-called threat, but what is generally lacking from these reports is any real concrete numbers showing that we should really be concerned. There’s also no effort made to show that those who do use these guns did so because they couldn’t get one via any other means, even illegal means.

Moreover, at the core of the issue–as it is with all so-called gun crime–is that the problem is a people problem, not an equipment issue. Remove guns and violent people will still be violent.