President Biden Announces Plans To Crack Down On Ghost Guns As Gun Violence Skyrockets

President Joe Biden announced new measures to crack down on “ghost guns,” which have been used in increasing shootings across the country.

Ghost gun kits can be purchased without a background check, can quickly be assembled into a gun, and have no serial numbers, making them almost impossible to trace. According to a White House release on the new measures, 20,000 “unserialized, privately made firearms” were reported to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) last year, a tenfold increase from 2016.

Among the measures is a rule qualifying ghost gun kits as “firearms” under the Gun Control Act, meaning that commercial manufacturers of such kits must therefore become licensed and include serial numbers on the kits’ frame or receiver, and commercial sellers of these kits must become federally licensed and run background checks before a sale, as they do with other commercially-made firearms.

Through this rule, the Justice Department would require federally licensed dealers to take any unserialized firearm in their inventory and serialize it before selling it to a customer. The rule also applies to any individual that builds an unserialized weapon and then sells it to a pawnbroker or federally licensed dealer.

Ghost guns have been involved in numerous shootings and murders in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, and Los Angeles. They have led to the rise in crime in cities across the U.S. Several cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, are proposing legislation banning ghost guns.

In New York, Mayor Eric Adams, a former NYPD officer, has rolled out a new version of the NYPD’s controversial anti-gun unit disbanded during the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement.

Additionally, the rule ensures firearms with split receivers are subject to regulations requiring serial numbers and background checks when purchased from a licensed dealer, manufacturer, or importer. The law also requires federally licensed gun dealers to keep detailed records until their business closes, at which time the records must be transferred to the ATF.

Also, on Monday, President Biden announced his new nominee to lead the ATF, Steve Dettelbach, who served as a U.S. attorney in Ohio from 2009 to 2016.

Dettelbach is expected to face a tough battle in his Senate confirmation. Biden was forced to withdraw his first nominee, gun control advocate David Chipman due to opposition from both Democrats and Republicans.

The situation has become a recurring theme as presidents on both sides have struggled to have their ATF picks confirmed. Since 2006, the only ATF nominee who made it through the confirmation process was B Todd Jones, who was confirmed in 2013 after a six-month battle.