3-D Printed Phantom Ghost Guns are an Imaginary Problem

Bad news for Gotham: Batman isn’t real.

Neither are high-tech phantom polymer guns — and all the angst and wailing about 3D printers churning out plastic gats from sea to shining sea doesn’t change that.

Urban legends are a poor basis for making public policy.

The federal government has undertaken two significant initiatives on the matter of undetectable plastic guns: banning them on the one hand, and then trying to invent them on the other. In the 1980s, the Pentagon invested in what turned out to be a fruitless project to build nonmetal firearms using ceramics. At the same time, Ronald Reagan signed into law a ban on the possession of firearms that can pass unseen through metal detectors.

That’s government work for you: banning something that doesn’t exist while spending great heaping piles of money trying to invent the thing you want to ban, and failing.

The unhappy truth is that you don’t need a space-age plastic gun to sneak past airport security. A 2015 test found a 95 percent failure rate among TSA agents trying to identify guns and other contraband. By 2017, ABC News reports, the TSA failure rate was down to around 80 percent.

We have an odd tendency to focus on the exotic when it comes to gun violence in the United States. There isn’t any evidence of undetectable homemade guns being used in violent crime in the United States. It just doesn’t happen. In the same way, politicians and television producers love the charismatic rat-a-rat of a machine gun but, here in the real world, legally owned fully automatic weapons have been used in — count ’em — two homicides since 1934, when the government started keeping score. Both were in Ohio, and one of the perpetrators was a police officer using a department-issued firearm.

The Obama administration had attempted, under the flimsiest of pretexts, to suppress the online publication of plans for building such weapons by classifying them as munitions subject to export controls. We’ve been down that road before: In the 1990s, the Clinton administration tried the same thing with an encryption tool called Pretty Good Privacy, insisting that anybody who sent a copy to a friend in Canada was an illegal international arms dealer. It was bull, and everybody knew it. The government eventually relented, and now ordinary Canadians and Belgians have access to strong encryption — which doesn’t seem to have mattered very much.

Approximately 0.0 percent of the homicides committed annually in New York City involve a 3D printed gun. Approximately 90 percent of them involve somebody with a prior police record, including many offenders previously charged with violent crimes and illegal firearms possession — a problem about which the powers that be are doing approximately squat. It’s worse in Chicago and Los Angeles.

We have real problems. Why focus on the imaginary ones?  (New York Post, August 4, 2018)
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Building a working firearm in a home workshop is not particularly difficult, and as long as the firearm you build complies with existing law - barrel and overall length, not a machinegun, etc. - it is perfectly legal to build your own guns.

https://ghostgunner.net/