Schumer Continues Anti-Gun Fear-Mongering On Ghost Guns :: 02/21/2020

The vast majority of people who build firearms at home are law-abiding citizens who just like to tinker with guns. Some are law-abiding citizens who prefer to not have a paper trail for their firearms but have no reason they couldn’t obtain one from a gun store. These probably represent something like 99 percent of homebuilt firearms in the United States.

However, anti-gunners like Sen. Charles Schumer continue to argue that these weapons represent some kind of a threat to the public and, as such, should be outright banned.

U.S. senate minority leader Chuck Schumer was in Kingston on Monday to warn of the danger posed by untraceable “ghost guns” and to call for immediate federal action to mandate background checks on all large firearms components. Schumer’s visit coincides with a recent spike in gun violence in the city.

“Ghost guns” refers to firearms assembled from parts which can be easily purchased online without a background check. Unlike fully assembled guns purchased legally, ghost guns do not have serial numbers, making them nearly impossible for police to trace. Speaking at Kingston police headquarters alongside Mayor Steve Noble, County Executive Pat Ryan and law-enforcement officials from Orange and Ulster counties, Schumer said ghost guns made it frighteningly easy for convicted felons and others barred from owning firearms to obtain deadly weapons.

Of course, Schumer also tried to say he believed in the Second Amendment.

Sure, and I believe he’s a complete and total idiot. Guess which one of us is right, though.

Schumer and his anti-gun buddies have continued to present so-called “ghost guns” as a growing threat that needs to be addressed, but notice how there’s always an absence of numbers? They don’t tell us how many or what percent of guns recovered from criminals are these “ghost guns” in the first place.

Why is that?

The only reason I’ve been able to discern is that the numbers are actually pretty damn small. If it represented 20,000 guns a year, you’d better believe they’d tell us that. After all, 20,000 guns is a lot, more than the total number of homicides annually. It’s enough of a number to scare people.

Yet as Schumer continues this jihad to try and kill “ghost guns”–a jihad he’s trying to pressure the Trump administration ATF to implement instead of trying to pass legislation–he has yet to present a single statistic so the American people can determine if this is a real problem or not.

Time and time again, news articles lamenting these guns talk about a “growing” problem, but there’s no context by which we can judge for ourselves. Had police found one gun in a given year, then two guns the next year, followed by three the year after, that’s a growing trend, but not a statistically significant one, especially in larger cities.

Without something more in place, we have no reason to take Schumer’s claim seriously, and that’s the line of attack we all need to take. Give me numbers. Show me how big of an issue it really is.

They won’t though. Schumer and his ilk haven’t done so because they know the problem isn’t that big, but they don’t want you to realize that. They want people to be afraid, to be terrified that criminals will just build whatever guns they want and bypass the regulations meant to keep them disarmed; that it will happen all because we didn’t regulate a handful of parts.

Meanwhile, who really gets hurt? The law-abiding citizen, particularly those who are building their own guns as they go because it’s cheaper to buy a couple of parts along the way than to buy a completed firearm.

In other words, Schumer’s proposing something that’ll hurt the poor worse than anyone else. Shocking, right? (Don’t answer that, it was rhetorical and sarcastic.)

At the end of the day, though, without hard numbers with which to judge any “threat” ourselves, all Schumer is doing is fear-mongering, as is his way.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/

https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/02/21/schume-anti-gun-fear-mongering/