They’re coming for your gun kit

If you own a firearm, sooner or later you’ll probably get interested in tinkering. After all, you have to assemble and disassemble your gun for cleaning or adding customized features.

Given the rising prices of ammunition, some enthusiasts learn how to recycle their ammunition casings and assemble new cartridges.

And some people like to build their own guns.

For years, kits have been legally sold that contain “80 percent” of what you’d need to build a gun, although generally some machining would be required to make a fully functioning firearm.

Currently, it’s legal to make a gun for your own personal use. You don’t need a license, and you don’t have to put a serial number on it.

But that could soon change.

Just like anti-gun activists have a scary name for semi-automatic rifles – ASSAULT weapons – they have a scary name for a firearm you build yourself — GHOST guns!!

President Biden has announced he’s considering a number of gun safety regulations, including regulating the sale of ghost guns.

Among the executive actions under consideration is one that would require buyers of so-called ghost guns — homemade or makeshift firearms that lack serial numbers — to undergo background checks.

But it’s not exactly clear how this would work.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recently announced that 30 percent of the guns it confiscated during the course of criminal investigations were ghost guns. That means 70 percent were not.

And criminals make up only a small portion of the market for gun kits. They’re mostly purchased by hobbyists and gun collectors who just like building things.

But that’s the key point. Criminals are by definition doing criminal things. They break laws. Mostly intentionally. So they can do stuff that is against the law.

Like steal, rob, and murder.

Shouldn’t our elected officials be spending more time trying to figure out how to reduce the amount of crime that’s occurring?

Last year homicides were on the rise. New York, Los Angeles and Chicago accounted for 40 percent of the additional homicide victims in 2020.

US News says a factor to partially explain the rising homicide rate after widespread racial unrest is what’s been called the “Ferguson Effect.” Violence heightens in cities with embattled police departments because of de-policing – described as a “pullback in proactive law enforcement by officers who fear they will be unfairly scrutinized and could lose their jobs.”

In other words, people get angry at the police. The police pullback. And the angry people commit more crimes against each other.

Seems like that’s where we should be focusing our reforms.

“When dealing with individuals who are at the highest risk for violence, either as perpetrators or victims, there is no one-size-fits-all solution,” Thomas Abt senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice told US News in an article about rising homicide rates.

Abt suggests presenting “a balanced array of potential punishments and rewards. You can’t arrest your way out of violence, but can’t program your way out of it either.”