(Morning Joe is going off on ghost guns this morning. Some of what they are saying is wrong.)
Guns in the US have to have stamped on them:
The name of the manufacturer.
The size of the bore.
The serial number.
Why is a serial number useful? If my gun is lost or stolen, a serial number would help me identify it if it is recovered. I cannot imagine a scenario where a hard-boiled detective would bust a murder case wide open based on a serial number.
I suppose I am missing something obvious. Little help?
But of course, what harm does a serial number requirement do? I cannot imagine getting too excited about this regulation one way or the other.
I can imagine one. If your stolen gun was recovered at a murder scene there may well be a link between the two crimes. Solve one and you may solve both.
A can’t legally buy a gun for some reason, whether he’s a felon or has domestic violence issues in his past. he enlists B to become a straw purchaser & buy a gun for him. In researching the gun found at the murder scene, they find that it was bought 6 months earlier by B in another state, & that B has a solid alibi for not being anywhere near the murder scene on the day in question. Hmmm, looks suspicious think the detectives.
Further investigating shows that B has bought a large number of handguns in a relatively short period of time. The PD then bring B in, sit him down & say we know you’re a straw buyer, we’ll put you away for a long time, now sing like a canary. They now have a lead that puts them closer to who actually used that gun to commit murder.
Back when Live PD was on every.single.time they ran across a gun, the first thing they did was find the serial number and check to see if it was stolen.
Whether you’re carrying a gun 100% legally (you’re allowed to have a gun, you’ve got it correctly holstered or stored, you have the proper licenses if applicable, you’re in an area where it’s not prohibited to have one etc etc etc) or not legally, if it’s stolen, that changes everything.
There’s a wide gap between it being useless and it being so useful that a detective could bust a murder case wide open with little more than just that number. How about finding someone in possession of a dozen guns that have all been reported stolen? That could bust open a gun trafficking ring.
How about a cop finding a gun on me that resembles a gun reported stolen yesterday? The serial number could be used to prove that I legally purchased it from a gun shop.
In any case, a ghost gun, from what I gather, is a ‘privately made’ gun. I can certainly see a lot of reason why a random guy with a mill or CNC machine shouldn’t be selling guns to the general public.
I agree that without a registration requirement the usefulness of serial numbers goes down, but serial numbers still make each gun a completely unique instrument and that’s very useful.
Think about fingerprints. Most people aren’t in criminal fingerprint databases, but it’s still very useful to dust for prints at a scene. Any data point is better than no data point.
Even if there’s not a government registry, the manufacturer and/or distributor might have records that allow the police to determine that it was part of a batch that was sold in a certain geographical area at a certain time. At least, I saw them do stuff like that on “Law & Order” with serial numbers on other products. And “Law & Order” wouldn’t lie to me, would it?
Firearms tracing begins when a law enforcement agency discovers a firearm at a crime scene and seeks to learn the origin or background of that firearm in order to develop investigative leads.
Tracing is a systematic process of tracking the movement of a firearm from its manufacture or from its introduction into U.S. commerce by the importer through the distribution chain (wholesalers and retailers), to identify an unlicensed purchaser. That information can help to link a suspect to a firearm in a criminal investigation and identify potential traffickers. Firearms tracing can detect in-state, interstate and international patterns in the sources and types of crime guns.
the S/N allows it to be tracked, from manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to purchaser; not as easily as the pressing of a couple of keystrokes if there was a centralized registry but it can still be tracked.
A serial number seems to be very helpful for many reasons, including manufacturing defects. With an item that controls an explosion and sends a lethal projectile I can see a reason for the end user to be able to ID if it were part of a defective lot. It seems to be a part of responsible gun ownership to be able to be contacted about such thing and identify any problems.
Serial numbers were put on guns long before they were a legal requirement. The purpose of the serial number was for the manufacturer to track the weapon through the manufacturing process and sale.
One of the reasons that parts needed to be tracked was that in the early days, parts often were not completely interchangeable. Originally, all weapons were hand-made. If you take parts off of a model 1795 musket and try to put them on a different model 1795 musket, the parts (especially in the guts of the lock mechanism) might not fit or work properly together. The parts were all made to a specific pattern, but they were hand made and hand fitted and adjusted to where the parts would work together as they should. In the 1800s there was a transition to parts made by machine instead of being made by hand, and the goal was that any part should fit into any weapon. But you can tell by tooling marks left on guns from that period that a lot of hand fitting and adjustments were done. Serial numbers allowed you to fit everything properly then disassemble the weapon and do things like heat treat or apply a finish of some sort to the parts, and then reassemble the parts using matching serial numbers to guarantee that your parts still fit together properly. Even in WWI and WWII some manufacturers were still putting serial numbers on many parts and were testing them together as matching sets. German WWII weapons are famous for this. Almost every part has a serial number stamped on it somewhere.
Serial numbers were also used to track the sales of the weapons. If you are selling to a county’s military, they tend to buy weapons in large lots, often many thousands at a time. Serial numbers track which guns were accepted and which guns were rejected, both during manufacturing and during acceptance by the military. At the end, the gun manufacturer has a list of which weapons passed, which weapons failed, how many total were produced, and how many were actually sold. They knew that some weapons would be rejected, so they made a rough guess at how many and made extras to make sure that the total number of sold met the contract requirements. Any extras left over from that would be sold on the surplus market.
Guns evolve. You produce a few thousand weapons and you find that there is a high rejection rate because one particular part keeps failing, or there is a high failure rate of a particular part in the field, so you create a better design for that part. The next few thousand guns have that improved part. If they make major changes they’ll often change the model number of the gun, but if it’s a minor change then the serial number is the only way to track which parts go into which weapons.
In 1934, the National Firearms Act (NFA) had a lot of new requirements that were designed to combat crime. One of these requirements was the use of serial numbers on all guns that were subject to the NFA. Note that not all guns were subject to the NFA due to its definition of a firearm. The 1968 Gun Control Act (CGA) added more requirements, including serial numbers on many weapons that originally had not been covered by the NFA.
The term “ghost gun” is a lot like the term “assault weapon” used in modern politics. It’s an intentional misnomer designed to make something sound scary. Most “ghost guns” are not really ghost guns in the way that the term is being tossed around today. They are mostly guns made for legal use by law abiding individuals. They are rarely used to commit crimes and are rarely used to subvert gun tracking laws. There have been cases where someone who isn’t allowed to own a weapon (felony conviction or whatever) and has been caught with a “ghost gun”, but the vast majority of unserialized non-NFA guns were legally made and have not been used for criminal purposes.
Here we should note that gun collectors, typically, dont see much collecting attraction to guns that are unserialised. A model whose development history and approximate/exact date of origin is not deducible is less sought after.
But I think the issue would be that yes, it can be tracked to the first purchaser from a dealer (if it is less than 20 years old) but then you have the issue, as private sales are legal in most states, from going to that first purchaser (who may not even be alive) but he tells you (truthfully) that he traded it about six years ago to “some guy” for an ATV the investigation is much at a dead end.
Of course, if the guy is best friends with the murder victim, perhaps that has given the investigators a solid lead.
Not really a crime to buy a gun and sell it. You can’t buy a gun for someone else, but currently the buyer would just say he sold it as a gun show or something.
Serial numbers are not much used in solving crimes. They can be handy if the gun is found at the scene and your lead suspect had purchased same gun.
But the real issue with Ghost Guns is not so much the serial number, it is the fact that the parts aren’t “firearms” so a dude can assemble a bunch and sell them- usually to people who can’t legally own a gun.
Sure, it just makes it harder for Gary the Gangbanger to buy that cool 9mm, but it is usually also cheaper for him. Thus more guns in the hands of bad actors, not responsible citizens.
This is an example of Good Gun Control.
Only to make a plot point. I.E- always.
True. But still, too many are ending up in the wrong hands.
