The Biden administration is to clamp down on untraceable firearms or what are known as “ghost guns” as part of a new initiative to deal with crime involving weapons.
The move – which essentially involves updating the legal definition of a firearm – will involve a ban on the manufacture of kits that can be accessed online and assembled at home into a working gun.
US president Joe Biden is to announce new regulations on Monday requiring commercial manufacturers of such kits to become licensed and to carry out background checks prior to a sale.
The White House defined "ghost guns" as privately-made firearms without serial numbers. It said police and law enforcement agencies were increasingly recovering such weapons at crime scenes in cities across the country.
Last year approximately 20,000 suspected “ghost guns” were reported to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) – the federal agency responsible for enforcing gun laws – as having been recovered as part of criminal investigations.
The White House said this represented a ten-fold increase from the level recorded in 2016. “Because ghost guns lack the serial numbers marked on other firearms, law enforcement has an exceedingly difficult time tracing a ghost gun found at a crime scene back to an individual purchaser.”
The new regulations to be announced by Mr Biden will seek to ban “the business of manufacturing the most accessible ghost guns, such as unserialised ‘buy build shoot’ kits that individuals can buy online or at a store without a background check and can readily assemble into a working firearm in as little as 30 minutes with equipment they have at home.”
The White House said the new regulations will clarify that such kits will be considered firearms under existing gun control legislation.
Under the new rules, commercial manufacturers of such kits “must therefore become licensed and include serial numbers on the kits’ frame or receiver, and commercial sellers of these kits must become federally licensed and run background checks prior to a sale – just like they have to do with other commercially-made firearms”.
The US Department of Justice will also require federally-licensed dealers and gunsmiths taking any unserialised firearm into their inventory to serialise the particular weapon.
The White House said if an individual built a firearm at home and then sold it to a pawnbroker or another federally licensed dealer, “that dealer must put a serial number on the weapon before selling it to a customer”.
“This requirement will apply regardless of how the firearm was made, meaning it includes ghost guns made from individual parts, kits, or by 3D-printers,” it said.
In future federally-licensed firearms dealers will also have to retain key records until they shut down their business, at which point these will have to be transferred to the ATF.
“Previously, these dealers were permitted to destroy most records after 20 years, making it harder for law enforcement to trace firearms found at crime scenes. According to the ATF’s national tracing centre, on average more than 1,300 firearms a year are untraceable because the federally-licensed firearms dealer destroyed the relevant records that were more than 20 years old,” the White House said.
