The latest federal effort to crackdown on violent crime and firearm-related deaths takes aim at untraceable ghost guns, which have been recognized as a fast-growing safety concern for the United States.
New rules announced earlier this month by President Joe Biden will require background checks on buyers of these partially manufactured frames and receivers that are self-assembled. Dealers and gunsmiths will be required to serialize and inventory any unregistered firearms that come into their business – including those made by 3-D printers – to be considered legal.
When these rules take effect around Aug. 24, Gov. Tom Wolf said at a news conference in York on Friday Pennsylvania will be ready to implement them.
Standing outside Wellspan York Hospital that saw more than 250 gunshot victims pass through its doors since 2018, Wolf, along with others, hailed the new rules as another tool to better enable law enforcement to cut down on gun-related violence and save lives.
“The numbers don’t lie: ghost guns are being seized and recovered from crime scenes at an alarming rate,” Wolf said. “Unserialized guns are an untraceable threat to our society – and Pennsylvania stands ready to immediately mirror this new federal regulation at the state level as soon as we can.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, gun-related deaths are at an all-time high. In 2020, more than 45,000 Americans – including 1,752 Pennsylvanians – died from firearm-related injuries.
“Too many of those deaths come from ghost guns, that are not subject to the checks and balances that keep legal gun owners and our communities safe,” Wolf said.
A ghost gun — sometimes referred to as an 80% receiver — can be legally bought online with no serial numbers or other markings on it, no license required.
In the eyes of pro-gun advocates, that is as it should be. The new federal rules have inspired a backlash among that crowd as well as federal legislation to repeal them.
Gun Owners of America plan to file a lawsuit soon to stop them and the organization’s Pennsylvania director Val Finnell anticipates other like-minded groups, will join in.
He said the rules restrict individuals’ right to turn pieces of metal and plastic into a firearm, a right people have had since before this nation was born. This effort by the Biden Administration to curb the proliferation of self-made guns represents an executive overreach of power that Article 1 in the U.S. Constitution invests within Congress, Finnell added.
“We expect there would be implementation of an injunction at some point; hopefully, to stop implementation to allow the court to consider the case,” he said.
He pointed out a lawsuit is pending in Commonwealth Court to block the 2019 implementation of Wolf and state Attorney General Josh Shapiro’s classification of ghost guns as a firearm.
The Pennsylvania State Police began officially tracking seizure of and recovery of ghost guns from crime scenes last year and recorded 24, according to the governor’s office. Philadelphia began tracking them in 2019 and recorded 95 seizures and recoveries in 2019, 250 in 2020, and more than double that number, 571 in 2021. Combined, state police and Philadelphia have recorded 147 already this year.
State police Commissioner Robert Evanchick called the forthcoming federal rules another tool that will help get ghost guns off the street. He said the state police have to the authority to carry out these rules through the Pennsylvania Uniform Firearms Act.
“It’s not an end-all and be-all,” Evanchick said at the news conference. “Just another tool that will help us in our fight.”
York City Police Commissioner Michael Muldrow described the issue of gun violence as a war that communities like York are fighting. He said in his city already this year, they have confiscated nearly 10 ghost guns with half of them from individuals who illegally possessed them.
“Gun violence is the number one threat our communities are facing throughout this county, across this state and around this country,” he said. “The one thing I hope we can all agree on no matter what side of the line you may fall is doing the things we have to do to stop the flow of illegal guns into our neighborhoods, getting them out of the hands of our kids and keeping our communities alive is the most important thing.”
Tiffany Lowe, who bears the title as York’s inaugural “credible messenger” and works with the city’s police department to support crime victims and try to curb violent crime, said communities need all the help they can get to address the problem with firearms.
“It’s unnatural to continuously bury our kids,” she said. “It’s unnatural for this problem to become a norm for us. I get it. We don’t want to build more jails or facilities to place our youth when they’re caught carrying firearms. But we also don’t want to continuously dig holes at the cemetery to bury them.”
Jan Murphy may be reached at jmurphy@pennlive.com. Follow her on Twitter at @JanMurphy.
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