GUNSThe Ghost Gun Surge Is Abating. This Is How It Happened.
Ghost guns went from being relatively rare to ubiquitous in a short time span. Regulating them appears to be fueling a reversal.
In 2021, California was in the throes of a ghost gun crisis. Police recovered nearly 11,000 of the unserialized, untraceable firearms that year alone, a nearly seven-fold increase from just two years earlier.
Though every state in the country was experiencing a surge in crimes committed with ghost guns, California was hit particularly hard, reporting more recovered ghost guns to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives than any other state by far. From 2017 to 2021, California accounted for 53 percent of the more than 37,000 ghost guns recovered nationwide and reported to the ATF. (That number is almost certainly an undercount.)
Ghost guns went from being relatively rare to ubiquitous in a pretty short time span, accounting for more than 18 percent of all crime guns recovered in California in 2021, up from less than 1 percent in 2016. The increase was evident in crimes of all types, including a dramatic 4,600 percent increase in ghost guns recovered from gun homicides of police officers and a 1,200 percent increase from domestic violence crimes.
But in the years since, those trends have reversed. Here’s how that happened.
The surge was fueled by a fast-growing industry selling nearly complete, finish-it-yourself gun kits. These ghost gun kits posed two major regulatory and public safety problems.
First, they weren’t legally considered firearms, which meant they could be sold without licenses, background checks, serial numbers, or record-keeping requirements. Because the kits could be sold without a background check, they became popular among people who otherwise couldn’t legally buy guns.
And second, the lack of a serial number on the finished “ghost gun,” once completed, presents a significant challenge for law enforcement, which needs serial numbers to trace firearms for leads in criminal investigations.
President Joe Biden began addressing those problems shortly after taking office in 2021. In one of his first official acts on gun violence, Biden directed the ATF and Justice Department to regulate ghost guns. The agency followed up with a new rule that deemed nearly complete ghost gun kits to be firearms, required manufacturers to serialize the weapon components, and subjected those guns to background checks. It took effect in August 2022.
