The sound of a gunshot woke Max Mendoza’s parents shortly after dawn. They ran out of the room and found their 12-year-old son leaning against the sofa, his eyes wide with pain, dread and amazement. “It’s real,” Max whispered, his hand pressed to his chest, looking haunted by a weapon that looked like a toy that could end his life in an instant.
But that’s what she did. Investigators in this town south of San Diego are still trying to determine exactly what happened that July morning: whether Max, who was in the seventh grade, accidentally shot himself, or whether a 15-year-old friend of his fired the gun when he was showing it to he.
What is certain is the type of weapon that killed Max. “Ghost weapons” are untraceable firearms with no serial number, assembled from parts purchased online. They are increasingly becoming the easiest access option for people in the US who are barred by law from acquiring or owning weapons.
The criminal underworld has long relied on stolen weapons with scraped-off serial numbers, but phantom weapons represent a digital upgrade of that. They are especially present in coastal states with a Democratic majority that have strong firearms control legislation.
Nowhere is this more real than in California, where the presence of these weapons is already reaching epidemic proportions, according to law enforcement officials in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco. Over the past 18 months, between 25% and 50% of firearms recovered from crime scenes were phantom weapons. And the vast majority of suspects with them were legally prohibited from owning firearms.
“Next month I will be 30 years on the force. To this day, I have never seen anything like this,” said Lt. Paul Phillips of the San Diego Police Department. He said that by early October the department had recovered nearly 400 ghost weapons — double the 2020 total.
Police aren’t sure why the use of phantom weapons is on the rise. But he says he believes it is due to a new and destructive technology that gains market presence and grows even more with the adhesion of buyers. This is not just happening on the West Coast of the USA. Since January 2016, local and federal law enforcement authorities have confiscated 25,000 privately made firearms.
Ghost guns and the niche industry that make them are on the rise due to a loophole in federal regulation: parts used to assemble “privately manufactured firearms” are classified as components, not weapons.
Thus, online shoppers do not need to undergo background checks or register their weapons. That’s why they attract people not authorized to own weapons, including criminals, domestic aggressors subject to protective orders, people with mental illnesses and minors, like the teenager who took his gun to Max Mendoza’s apartment, according to police.
Closing that gap is the goal of new regulations announced by President Joe Biden. Basically, the new rules would treat phantom guns like traditional firearms, requiring major components to carry serial numbers, imposing background checks, and forcing online shoppers to pick up guns at stores licensed by federal authorities.
Officials in California think the rules will help deter criminals and children from getting phantom guns. “It’s definitely going to end with some of the most glaring problems,” said Los Angeles Attorney Mike Feuer, who is suing a major manufacturer of weapons components.
But the new rules, which will likely be challenged in court by firearms law enforcement agencies, are unlikely to be implemented until early 2022. And gun control organizations question the firmness of oversight by federal regulators.
What’s more, while the proposed rules are likely to create a host of legal obstacles, law enforcement officials say illegal parts sales channels will certainly adapt and thrive. There is a large surplus of parts in circulation, and at the same time, the increasing availability of 3D printers capable of creating weapons components has opened up a new irregular source of illegal weapons.
The epidemic appears to be hitting young people disproportionately, as buyers, perpetrators and victims. Two years ago, a 16-year-old college student entered a Los Angeles high school and killed two teenagers with a 45-caliber semi-automatic pistol assembled from parts from a kit, before turning the gun on himself. This case, more than any other, has drawn national attention to weapons.
a deadly gap
The debate raged in Washington for decades over gun control has been about the regulation of traditional firearms. Phantom weapons pose a more primordial question: what makes a firearm a firearm? Every semi-automatic weapon consists of two main parts: the movable upper “slide”, which rests in the barrel, and the “receiver”, or frame.
Under federal law, any frame or receiver deemed 80% finished is a functional firearm, subject to the same rules as a fully assembled weapon. If it is less than 80% finished, it is not subject to the same federal safeguards.
The Alcohol, Tobacco, Weapons and Explosives Bureau (ATF) assesses each individual component. But critics accuse the agency of failing to fully investigate companies that sell kits with everything needed to quickly assemble a phantom weapon. “I think a lot of us thought we still had ten years to deal with this problem, when in reality it was only two,” said David Chipman, a former ATF agent who was nominated by Biden to head the agency but was stripped of his name. in September due to fierce opposition from the arms lobby.
Chipman had promised to prioritize the issue of phantom weapons. The failure of his nomination led gun control proponents to question the ATF’s efforts to implement the new rules.
Despite this, the ATF collaborated with local law enforcement in dozens of blitzes to seize phantom guns and recently took on the industry-leading Nevada company Polymer80, whose products represent the majority of phantom guns found at California crime scenes in 2019.
The company sells a wide range of components online, but the ATF has focused its attention on one of its most popular kits: the $590 “Buy, Build and Shoot” and that contained almost everything to make a functional pistol in the style of the Glock pistol.
In December, the ATF stormed Polymer’s headquarters near Reno, accusing the company of not submitting its kits to regulators for approval. The operation has not yet resulted in any criminal charges. But Polymer stopped selling the kits.
Violence
Retired high school teacher Steven R. Ely, 69, had never heard of phantom guns until he was nearly killed by one. Just after 10 pm on April 24, he turned a corner in San Diego’s Gaslamp neighborhood, heard four or five gunshots, and felt something hit the right side of his body. He saw a spreading red stain. Her knees gave out. He would spend weeks in the hospital.
Ely was one of the victims of an outbreak of violence that began, investigators said, when a man named Travis Sarreshteh, 32, approached a hotel valet and shot him without warning with a Polymer80 pistol. Justice Boldin, 28, died almost instantly.
Then Sarreshteh — who pleaded not guilty to murder — ran into a group of friends from New Jersey. He turned and fired, wounding two of the men slightly, police said. A third man was injured in the arm, lungs, spleen and stomach. Ely was probably hit in that hail of bullets.
Police are still not sure how Sarreshteh got the gun. But he says being a phantom weapon allowed him to dodge a background check that would have revealed an important criminal history. The shooting barely made headlines across the country, but it heavily mobilized San Diego authorities. “How could a person prohibited from buying a firearm legally have access to a 9-caliber gun and shoot five people on the street?” asked San Diego councilor Marni von Wilpert, author of a law banning the use of firearms. no serial numbers.
Community leaders in some of the state’s violent neighborhoods have been sounding the alarm for two years, with more teenagers looking to handguns for protection or to signal that they are strong.
“People aren’t buying real guns anymore,” said Antoine Towers, who works with an anti-violence program in Oakland. “Almost all young people today use phantom weapons.”
Earlier last year, Bryan Muehlberger of Los Angeles wanted to demonstrate how easy it is for a minor to buy a kit online to make a firearm. He ordered the kit using the name of his teenage daughter, Gracie, ticking off the boxes indicating she was a legal buyer.
The company, which he does not want to identify because she is in possession of personal information about her family, processed the request without bothering to verify that Gracie was over 21, as required by state law. “I received a package in the mail addressed to Gracie Muehlberger,” he said, pausing to calm down. “I was appalled.”
Gracie Muehlberger is dead. She was shot down by a phantom weapon when she was 15 years old, alongside Dominic Blackwell, 14, in the attack on Saugus High School.
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