Unserialized weapons [no serial numbers], colloquially known as “ghost guns,” entered the American imagination as the creation of hobbyists and backyard tinkerers. But as they’ve grown in popularity, criminals have identified ghost guns as a way to get around California’s restrictive gun laws. This class of weapons is easy to buy, and undetectable to authorities, because they are built without the government’s knowledge.
An investigation by The Trace in partnership with NBC Bay Area, NBC San Diego, and NBC Los Angeles found that law enforcement agencies across California are recovering record numbers of ghost guns. According to the ATF, 30 percent of all guns now recovered by agents in the state are unserialized. And without a serial number, they cannot be traced in criminal investigations.
California police departments that track ghost gun recoveries are seeing a similar trend. “This is not just something for enthusiasts. This has become something for people that are actual practitioners of violence,” said Graham Barlowe, the resident agent in charge at the ATF’s Sacramento field office. A ghost gun is a firearm manufactured outside of the traditional supply chain. It can be printed on a 3-D printer, or assembled with parts sold by the dozens of companies that create nearly completed firearms — known as “80 percent receivers,” which require no background check to sell.
As ghost guns proliferate across the state, lawmakers and police are scrambling to understand the scale of the problem, let alone remedy it. In 2016, the California Legislature passed a law requiring residents to register homemade weapons with law enforcement. A separate requirement outlawed the possession of unregistered ghost guns.
But records obtained by The Trace and NBC indicate that the law has had little effect. Compliance with the law is low, and prosecutors have never brought charges under the new statute. Now California law enforcement members are encountering ghost guns being made by criminals building them in their basement, as well as organized groups churning out untraceable firepower by the hundreds. “We’ve seen machine shops where they are lining them up and and completing them in 20-minute intervals, with three or four machines going at once,” said Barlowe, the ATF agent in Sacramento.
https://www.thetrace.org/2019/05/ghost- ... nia-crime/In 2014, the agency started carefully observing businesses like Ares Armor to see if their products crossed the line from part to firearm, which would require Karras to obtain a federal license to sell guns and and complete a background check with every sale. The ATF decided that Ares Armor had crossed the line, and raided the stores. Two dozen agents seized 6,000 incomplete receivers, and a list of 5,000 customers. Prosecutors accused Ares Armor of selling AR-15 receivers that passed a thin technical threshold making them “firearms”.
But after a series of court battles, and with agency never having officially charged Karras, the ATF gave the gun parts back — parts that Karras would later go on to sell. “They did absolutely nothing about it,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, they know they’re wrong.” The ATF declined to comment on the case.
In 2014, Polymer80, one of the nation’s larger producers of 80 percent receivers, was also raided. The case was dropped. ATF sources told The Trace that the U.S. Attorney’s Office dropped the case because of fears that a courtroom loss would create a bad legal precedent.
CA gun laws at work protecting us.