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The firearm issue that should be uniting us in outrage: ghost guns

2023-07-18 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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A Maryland teenager asked his mother if he was going to live, and she couldn’t tell him the truth.

The truth: The ghost gun his classmate used to shoot him inside a school restroom had caused a life-threatening amount of damage to his body.

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The truth: Despite numerous surgeries, and a lengthy hospital stay, he needed to keep fighting.

The truth: She didn’t know at that moment if he was going to survive.

If you’ve been paying attention to the harm that has been caused by ghost guns — those firearms that can be bought online in parts and come without serial numbers — then you know they have destroyed many lives. They have been used in deadly shootings across the nation, and even when people have survived shootings, they have experienced losses of other kinds. Bullets fired from those guns have landed young people in hospital beds for excruciating stays and sent teenagers to prison with long sentences.

What happened to DeAndre Thomas shows that. Thomas was 15 when he was shot at his Montgomery County high school by a 17-year-old classmate who was later sentenced to 18 years for attempted first-degree murder. For that sentencing, Thomas’ mother, Karen Thomas, spoke in court about how she watched her son fight for his life in a hospital for more than 50 days and how she responded when he asked about his condition.

Magruder High shooter sentenced to 18 years but could be out much sooner

“It is torture for a mother to be asked by her child if he is going to live,” Thomas is quoted as saying in a Washington Post article about the sentencing. “I pretty much lied to him because we didn’t know if he was going to make it or not.”

I remember reading that article at the time and feeling angry that a ghost gun did that. Angry as a mother to two boys I would do anything to protect. Angry as someone who as a teenager saw my classmates experience the trauma of a fatal shooting. Angry as a journalist who has written about young lives lost to gun violence and repeatedly watched solutions that would keep children safer fall between political divides.

An 11-year-old boy’s killing isn’t proof black lives don’t matter to black people. It’s proof of our collective failure.

If there is one firearm issue that should unite us in outrage, it is ghost guns. Those weapons benefit no one except for the companies that produce those parts and profit from them, knowing they are ending up in the hands of people who wouldn’t be eligible to get firearms from a licensed dealer, including teenagers.

A Washington Post article that ran online Wednesday revealed how easy it is for teenagers to buy the parts for ghost guns online, assemble them on their own and use them to harm others. The article, written by my colleagues Tom Jackman and Emily Davies, showed through detailed data and heartbreaking cases the disturbing scope of the issue.

Teens buying ‘ghost guns’ online, with deadly consequences

Some of the data highlighted in the article:

— Last year, police departments seized at least 25,785 ghost guns nationwide, the Justice Department said recently, and those are just the weapons submitted by police to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for tracing, even though they don’t have serial numbers and largely cannot be traced.

— ATF has linked ghost guns to 692 homicides and nonfatal shootings through 2021, including mass killings and school shootings.

— ATF estimated that the company Polymer80 was responsible for more than 88 percent of the ghost guns recovered by police between 2017 and 2021, though there are nearly 100 manufacturers selling parts, or full kits, which can be made into unserialized guns, a list compiled by Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates against gun violence, shows.

— At least 12 states, including Virginia, have adopted laws regulating unserialized weapons, though the parts makers continue to ship them almost everywhere.

— Everytown compiled a list of more than 50 incidents involving teens and ghost guns since 2019.

When you hear about an individual case in which a ghost gun was used, it’s easy to dismiss that homemade weapon as rare. But we now know too much to not acknowledge the pervasiveness of the issue.

We now know a 16-year-old in New York created a “ghost gun factory” in his bedroom. We now know a 13-year-old and 16-year-old in Maryland were arrested at school while carrying ghost guns. We now know that an 18-year-old in Virginia who was an admitted drug dealer with mental health issues and too young to buy a handgun from a licensed dealer used a ghost gun to kill two schoolmates.

Young people are getting their hands on largely untraceable guns with the ease of ordering school supplies. That should worry not only people who want to see more gun-control measures put in place. That should also worry lawful gun owners who obtained their firearms from licensed dealers and are tired of defending their rights. That should worry anyone who has a child and knows how one careless act in a heated moment can have permanent consequences.

The companies that make ghost gun parts have for too long been allowed to operate unchecked, and that needs to change. But for that to happen, public pressure is needed. Already some states and cities have taken action. The article says that after settling a case in Los Angeles, the company Polymer80 “cannot sell gun kits in California without serializing parts and performing background checks.”

The Biden administration and ATF also put in place a rule that would qualify frames and receivers as firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968, requiring companies to add serial numbers and conduct background checks before selling them. Ghost gun companies are fighting that rule in court, and depending on what happens, the case could make its way to the Supreme Court.

The right to privacy will undoubtedly be touted as a reason to let those companies continue to operate as they have been. But what the public needs to question is whether privacy is really what those companies are trying to protect. Also, what is the public cost of protecting the privacy of a teenager with mental health struggles, a temper and the skills to put together a ghost gun?

That Washington Post article ends with a parent of a Virginia teenager who was killed by a ghost gun asking two questions: “How many more of these guns are out there? How many more of these guns are in my community?”

We don’t know that answer, and yet we do.

The truth: Too many.

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