Like all gun control, Biden's ghost gun push is conspicuous futility

In his latest effort to pretend he is doing something about skyrocketing crime rates, President Joe Biden rolled out his new rule on so-called ghost guns this week. In doing so, he peddled a number of anti-gun cliches and silly comments.

For example, he stated, "You couldn't buy a cannon when the Second Amendment passed." First of all, this is not even true — as of this writing, we cannot find a law from that era banning the purchase of cannons. But more importantly, it is irrelevant to discussions about guns. There has never been a Second Amendment right to keep or bear artillery, land mines, bombs, tanks, nukes, or any other weapons that do not meet the legal and contextual definition of "arms" — i.e., melee or projectile weapons that individuals can wear on their person and carry.

Biden also asserted that 20,000 "suspected ghost guns" are being recovered at crime scenes annually. This statement's relevance depends upon the fallacy that the government has some business tracking who owns guns in the first place. But it is also misleading because the data do not suggest that homemade guns are being used in large numbers of crimes. Between 2016 and 2020, homemade firearms were used in less than 1% (0.36% to be exact) of all homicides. According to the FBI, most guns recovered at crime scenes are not home-printed but rather purchased on the black market (43%), stolen by the perpetrator (6%), acquired from friends or relatives (15%), purchased at retail (10%), or brought to the crime scene by someone other than the perpetrator (12%).