It’s no secret that the Democratic Party has been against firearms in the hands of civilians for some time. Year after year, proposals after legislative proposals have been made in both houses of Congress on the matter. And while they have not succeeded in outlawing the Second Amendment altogether, new rules and regulations regarding gun control have undoubtedly been put into existence.
2021 is no different in that respect.
However, thanks to both the Senate and House of Representatives having a Democrat majority, albeit slim, as well as a Democratic president in the White House, the odds of the ever-left leaning party getting their way is higher than ever.
Consider the matter of “ghost guns,” for instance.
If you aren’t familiar with this term, these essentially are gun kits or firearms that can be assembled at home or created using 3-D printers. And as such, their parts don’t contain serial or manufacturing numbers – making them virtually untraceable.
Thanks to technology innovations like the 3-D printer, these guns are becoming increasingly popular and prominent. According to a Forbes article by Joe Walsh, 2016 found about 2,000 “ghost guns” at crime scenes by police. In 2020, that number increased to a whopping 9,000.
And, of course, the political left wants the mitigate the problem.
As Democratic Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline says, “Gun violence is a public health epidemic in our country. In recent years, the increased presence of ghost guns in our communities has made this problem even worse. These untraceable weapons make it harder for law enforcement to find and prosecute violent criminals.”
And so he’s proposing legislation that would “close the ghost gun loophole and make these weapons easier to trace.”
According to a news release put out by Cicilline, “The Untraceable Firearms Act closes the ghost gun loophole by amending the existing definition of ‘firearm’ under the federal law to include gun kits and partial receivers and by changing the definition of ‘manufacturing firearms’ to include assembling firearms using 3D printing technology.”
The release added that changing these definitions would make untraceable weapons “subject to existing federal firearm regulation.”
Now, I’m not saying that the idea to make these guns somehow traceable isn’t a horrible one. As Forbes pointed out, they have been increasingly used to commit crimes.
However, as with any gun law or regulation, it must be carefully weighed so as to not trample upon our Constitutional rights or give federal agencies like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives or ATF too much power.
And this prosed regulation would most certainly do that.
As the National Rifle Association, or NRA, says, the legislation “would do nothing to address violent crime while further burdening law-abiding gun owners and the lawful firearm industry with overbroad regulations.”
Criminals, by the very definition of the word, commit crimes. They have no problem breaking the law. If they want to use a weapon to commit a crime, whether that’s murder or an armed robbery, they’re going to use whatever they have at their disposal.
Right now, that might be ghost guns. Taking them away from criminals or making them less accessible won’t change the outcome. They’ll simply use whatever else they get their hands on.
If you don’t believe me, just look at the FBI’s records for homicide in the last few years. Sure, there are a lot of gun crimes, but there are far more committed with knives.
And yet, no one’s trying to ban those, are they?
Furthermore, the NRA says that changing these definitions give “an incredible amount of power” to the head of ATF. And that’s something we should all be leery of.
Now, it’s critical to point out that Cicilline is not the first to propose legislature on this matter. Both California Senator Dianne Feinstein and Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal have put forth similar bills in the past to no avail.
However, this is the first time that the Democratic left has had a real opportunity to push such a measure through – especially if they decide to use the nuclear option of bypassing the filibuster, as they did to get H.R 1 passed.
We can only hope that this one, like all rest, fails to get the support it needs in either house.