Desperate Biden Turns To Gun Control
Dems hope to distract from low confidence in their performance and tomorrow's disastrous inflation report by blaming firearm-building hobbyists.
Today the White House released a “fact sheet” pertaining to their war on “ghost guns” and their announcement of a new nominee for ATF director. The release says the President is nominating Steve Dettelbach for the position. The department has gone without a confirmed director for years.
The ATF also posted the finalized definition of receiver/frame here (it will go into effect 120 days from now) which states that build kits must be regulated the same as finished, operable firearms and transfer records must now be kept indefinitely.
So when can we buy 79% lowers?
GHOST GUNS
Some definitions. This is what is called (in slang, not an official term) an 80% lower:
The term “80% lower” is industry slang for a receiver/frame (whether rifle or handgun), a blank, an unserialized chunk of a type of aluminum or polymer that is inoperable and cannot operate unless it goes through further stages of fabrication/manufacturing. It describes an inoperable and unfinished portion of a firearm that a hobbyist can fabricate at home. Drilling out portions of the aluminum in specific ways brings this chunk of aluminum to meet the definition of a “firearm” as defined by the Gun Control Act.
It is perfectly legal for a hobbyist who wants to build a rifle or handgun for their own personal use to do so and you’re not required to add a serial number to your hunk of metal during the build. Federal law prohibits these hobbyists from selling these legal builds without serial numbers.
From the release:
U.S. Department of Justice has issued a final rule to rein in the proliferation of “ghost guns” – unserialized, privately-made firearms that law enforcement are increasingly recovering at crime scenes in cities across the country.
… Last year alone, there were approximately 20,000 suspected ghost guns reported to ATF as having been recovered by law enforcement in criminal investigations – a ten-fold increase from 2016.[1]
We don’t know where the ATF gets this number and the claims from different agency mouthpieces conflict. The linked annotation conveniently goes nowhere. The big push on “ghost guns” looks like it was kickstarted by a comment from a retired agent after Biden’s inauguration.
The Second Amendment Foundation’s Lee Williams asked the ATF’s program manager for their Public Affairs Office directly to substantiate the ATF’s claims after one of their retired agents said half the agency’s California cases were due to “ghost guns.”
Carlos A. Canino, former Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the ATF’s Los Angeles Field Division – can be credited for jumpstarting the war on homemade firearms, so it is especially important to verify everything he has said. After all, last year the ATF announced notice of proposed rulemaking that could regulate many of the core components of homemade firearms. To be clear, Canino’s quotes caused all of this.
In 2020, activists from the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun empire asked Canino about the prevalence of homemade firearms in California. An earlier study said 30% of the guns recovered by ATF in California were unserialized “ghost guns,” but Canino said the real numbers were actually much higher. “Forty-one percent, so almost half our cases we’re coming across are these ‘ghost guns,’” Canino told the anti-gun activists. That was all it took. The entire gun-ban industry jumped on Canino’s statement like a duck on a June bug.
[…]
“I contacted the Los Angeles Field Division earlier today after your initial email, and their Public Information Officer was unable to verify any figures provided in 2019 by former-SAC Canino without knowing the time-period(s) he used for his comments,” Longnecker said in the email. “For that reason, we rely on verifiable data generally documented on our website or obtained through a FOIA request.”
[…] “I am not aware of any other verified PMF (Privately Made Firearm) data that has been published by ATF,” Longnecker wrote.
THE PROBLEM ISN’T WITH HOBBYISTS
The administration and ATF expect you to believe, without evidence, that the recent increase in homicide is due to an influx of these firearms. We are expected to believe that repeat offenders driving crime — in coincidentally Democrat-controlled states with some of the strictest gun control laws in the country — are milling and building rifles and handguns using their drill presses and routers to finish out the blocks of aluminum. It wasn’t restorative justice, Soros-backed district attorneys who won’t prosecute crime, defunding the police, or driving our economy into the ground with restrictions on energy and massive government spending that contributed to crime, no, it’s at-home hobbyists driving the crime — or “teens” as Ted Williams, former DC metro police officer and attorney said earlier on Fox:
Equipment isn’t cheap. We can’t expect teenagers to know how to change a tire or even know their gender but they can do this? Is that the conclusion after investigating all the smash and grabs up and down California’s coast?
Hobbyists aren’t the problem and neither are privately-made firearms for personal use. An accidental admission by the ATF via CBS:
Ghost guns are also tied to 325 homicides or attempted homicides nationwide since 2016.
As initially reported by Tom Knighton, there were 89,680 murders in the nation from 2016 to 2021. The ATF said last month that 325 homicides were attributable to “ghost guns.” That amounts to less than a third of one percent.
So the ATF is using data it refuses to verify as the basis to restrict rights further while doing nothing to stop criminals they’re tracking from using illegally obtained firearms in crimes.
ATF DIRECTOR
Biden also nominated former US attorney and gun-control advocate, Steve Dettelbach to head the ATF. Dettelbach supports so-called universal background checks, nothing more than a different name for a federal firearms registry. He can claim that he doesn’t want to politicize the position but vowing support for a blatantly unconstitutional violation of existing federal law does just that.
LOWLIGHTS FROM TODAY’S PRESSER
Three big lies and a bonus ramble on sofas:
Wrong. You could absolutely buy a cannon.
He banned an arbitrary number of cosmetic features the very semi-auto rifles involved in the fewest crimes nationally and the ban didn’t lower crime. California restricted their magazine capacity and crime spiked anyway.
I’m not worried about a deer breaking into my home — like the nutjob who flew across the country three years ago and tried to bust into my living room window. This is a stupid talking point that plays dumb about the purpose of the Second Amendment: curbing a tyrannical government.
Biden also added:
"Gun manufacturers have more immunity from liability than any other American industry."
I’ve written and discussed this many times. Biden is taking a crack at the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA). PLCAA only states that firearm manufacturers, like any other manufacturer, cannot be held liable for a criminal who chooses to misuse the product in an illegal manner. They, like all others, can be held liable for damages from defective products or false advertising. Biden lied here.
Lastly, who writes these analogies for him?
Other than from Ikea, what couches do you have to assemble? What?
*UPDATE: Here’s a fun past tweet from the proposed Director of the ATF:
A response:
