Suspicion of the Government is Justified

AtThe Federalist Max McGuire tells us that Joe Biden's Ghost Gun 'Ban' Lasted Less Than A Minute. That's because selling an 80% frame plus the bits and parts to make it into a full frame was suddenly deemed illegally selling a firearm. So, they now sell the frame in separate packaging from the other items. Voila, problem solved. But, what is lost here is why the regulation was propsed in the first place. It was supposed to keep unserialized guns out of the hands of criminals. So how's that working out?

The Biden administration and its allies are celebrating that President Joe Biden has now “banned ghost guns” by executive order. A “ghost gun,” as the gun control movement calls it, is a homemade firearm that does not have a serial number and is not known by the federal government to exist. Since the moment our country was founded, it has always been legal at the federal level to build a firearm for personal use, as long as the firearm manufactured is otherwise legal to own. As of August 24, 2022, a new federal regulation prohibits kits with all of the parts needed to build a gun from being sold to the public without a background check.

As the gun control movement describes it, America’s streets are now safe from the scourge of homemade firearms because companies cannot sell the kits to make these guns without the purchaser receiving them through a licensed gun store and undergoing a background check.

Gentle readers can read the the intracacies of when is a block of metal a firearm. Lawyers will no doubt find it iteresting. Most will not. What should interest you and every American is the following:

This regulation has only succeeded in making the gun-building process more complicated and expensive. It has not stopped a single criminal from acquiring parts to illegally build a gun. Considering there is a step-by-step guide on the internet showing how to turn a rusty shovel into an AK-47, it is safe to say that anyone looking to illegally build a gun will continue to be able to do so. Criminals in our society already break countless laws on a daily basis; why would anyone think a regulation like this would finally stop them?

This regulation was never aimed at the criminal class, though. Like all gun control, it targets the law-abiding. Politicians and bureaucrats fear homemade firearms because they exist outside of regulated firearm commerce. There is no serial number or background check, so the federal government does not know who owns them. In a dystopian future where government agents could be dispatched to seize Americans’ known or registered firearms, the homemade guns would remain. Just as the colonial blacksmiths secretly repaired and built guns for the revolutionary war effort, the ability to manufacture arms today ensures that free Americans will never truly be deprived of the ability to defend themselves.

While Biden appears to know about as much about guns as can be learned at your local movie theatre, I suspect the people writing the the Executive Order knew what they were doing. They never intended to target criminals, indeed they intended to target law abiding gun owners. Which brings me to what I have always said, the government that doesn't trust its citizens is not to be trusted by those citizens.