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Crime United States

Teenagers Have Bought 'Ghost Guns' Online, Sometimes with Deadly Consequences (msn.com) 462

Posted by EditorDavid from the oh-shoot dept.
The Washington Post begins a recent article with the story of an 18-year-old drug dealer with mental health issues named Zachary Burkard, who shot two unarmed 17-year-olds with a "ghost gun" he built from a kit bought online.

The father of one of those 17-year-olds thinks "They've just made it entirely too easy to get these guns... A child can buy one. There's no background checks. You don't even need a bank account. You can go to 7-Eleven and get a debit card, put money on it and buy a gun." The families of the two teens, with the help of the anti-gun-violence group Everytown for Gun Safety, are now suing the distributor of the parts Burkard used to make his ghost gun, 80P Builder of Florida, and the manufacturer, Polymer80 of Nevada, for gross negligence in providing a teenager with a weapon when he was not legally able to buy a handgun from a federally licensed dealer. The case, those who track the weapons say, demonstrates a frightening phenomenon... Teenagers have discovered the ease with which they can acquire the parts for a ghost gun, and they have been buying, building and shooting the homemade guns with alarming frequency. Everytown for Gun Safety compiled a list of more than 50 incidents involving teens and ghost guns since 2019. Among them:

- In Brooklyn Park, Minn., police arrested two teens with ghost guns in December after authorities said one of them attempted to shoot someone outside their car but instead killed their friend inside it.
- In New Rochelle, N.Y., a 16-year-old created a "ghost gun factory" in his bedroom last year, police said, before killing another 16-year-old...

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) estimated that Polymer80 was responsible for more than 88 percent of the ghost guns recovered by police between 2017 and 2021, though there are nearly 100 manufacturers selling parts, or full kits, which can be made into unserialized guns, a list compiled by Everytown shows. Teens are hardly the only users. Last year, police departments seized at least 25,785 ghost guns nationwide, the Justice Department said recently, and those are just the weapons submitted by police to ATF for tracing, even though they don't have serial numbers and largely cannot be traced. In 2021, the number of guns recovered was 19,344, meaning seizures rose 33 percent the following year.

ATF has linked ghost guns to 692 homicides and nonfatal shootings through 2021, including mass killings and school shootings...

[This May] in Baltimore, authorities arrested three 14-year-olds after armed robberies and an armed carjacking. Police said one of them had a ghost gun. And in Valdosta, Ga., authorities said, a 16-year-old bought a ghost gun kit online in 2021 and assembled her own Glock-style pistol. One day while some friends were at her house, the teen accidentally shot a 14-year-old in the head, leaving him partially paralyzed, with severe brain damage and permanent physical and cognitive issues, his family's lawyer Melvin Hewitt said.
While some states have passed regulations, last year America's national firearm-regulating agency also declared parts of ghost guns to be firearms, according to the article, in an attempt to close a commonly-cited loophole. The parts makers challenged the new rule in court, lost twice, then won in a conservative federal court in Texas. The U.S. Justice Department may now appeal that decision to the higher Fifth Circuit court, and if it loses there "could appeal to the Supreme Court." Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, said he is against all regulation of privately made firearms, calling the practice of building weapons a "long and storied tradition in America."
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Teenagers Have Bought 'Ghost Guns' Online, Sometimes with Deadly Consequences More

Teenagers Have Bought 'Ghost Guns' Online, Sometimes with Deadly Consequences

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  • Stupid people will be stupid. What else is new? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @11:45AM (#63690143)

    While teenagers are not more stupid on average than adults, they know even less often about their limits. Let them do it. It serves to improve the race via evolution.

    Also, there really is no way to stop this, unless you want a surveillance fascism. To be fair, that is _exactly_ what the religiously deranged want.

    • Re:Stupid people will be stupid. What else is new? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by splitstem ( 10397791 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @12:01PM (#63690185)

      The French are doing their part to stop this. An organization [reddit.com] there have been finding STL models of guns on the Internet and changing them so they either are ineffective or blow up in the user's hands. This is how Europe is taking steps to handle this. The best way is Europeans to pay for pro-child candidates come US election times, because the Citizens United verdict allows anyone to donate to a politician's campaign.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Reminds me of the good ol' days when USGOV killed a few thousand people by poisoning liquor barrels during prohibition.
      • The more that organization does this, the more that society's ill intent will move the trading of such files underground. It may work for a little while, but eventually, everyone who wants the STL file will know where to get uncompromised versions from or who to ask that does. Then that society will be right back to square one.

        As for the Bribery Division verdict, if you think that some Europeans trying to get rid of the US's second amendment is going to work, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you. Sure t

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by thegarbz ( 1787294 )

      Let them do it. It serves to improve the race via evolution.

      Nothing says "evolution" more than the many examples of going into a school and killing the people trying to get themselves an education. Gun culture in America practices devolution, not evolution. The mentally damaged are the ones doing the killing.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by gweihir ( 88907 )

        Then maybe do not mistreat kids so much in school? The only reason teenagers are doing school-shootings is because they experienced school as constant torture. That is a fundamental failing of the schools, not the teenagers.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by splitstem ( 10397791 )

          Maybe if you take the availability of guns away, it can't hurt? Schools may be rough, but it is the parents and the home which provide the guns. By removing the guns, gee willikers, the mass shootings stop.

          • Re:Stupid people will be stupid. What else is new? (Score:5, Insightful)

            by codebase7 ( 9682010 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @02:22PM (#63690651)
            No, it just pushes the behavior further underground. After which it will either resurface as an illegal gun acquisition (theft / criminal connections / 3D printing / etc.), or wait until some trigger later in life causes them to legally purchase a firearm (because they have no criminal record), and the mass shooting occurs then. Because they never got help when they needed it. Instead society just took their toys away for a little while, continued to ignore their issue (at best), and was shocked that the person was still mad after returning the toys to them.

            Even if you could wave a magic wand and poof out every gun in the universe out of existence, you still haven't fixed the original problem: That the person in question had already justified killing others as an acceptable outcome in their own mind. Until you fix that problem, it doesn't matter what weapons or other means of harming others you take away from them. You're just delaying the inevitable by ignoring the core issue.

            • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

              by splitstem ( 10397791 )

              No, it won't be pushed underground, it will be made harder. It will be like a dude in China who goes ape with a sword and gets stopped after hacking down 1-2 people, as opposed to hundreds. It will be someone who tries driving a car through a barricade and kills a few people.

              You can't stop the intent, but you can make the body counts fewer by removing force multipliers.

          • Do you even realize how much damage one could do with a couple of bike locks and two gallons of diesel fuel? It's not the inanimate objects that are the problem here.

        • Re:Stupid people will be stupid. What else is new? (Score:4, Interesting)

          by smokinpork ( 658882 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @02:31PM (#63690681)
          This has been debunked...see for example https://www.vox.com/2014/11/3/... [vox.com]

        • Then maybe do not mistreat kids so much in school? The only reason teenagers are doing school-shootings is because they experienced school as constant torture. That is a fundamental failing of the schools, not the teenagers.

          I'm glad you've come up for a cure for mental illness as well as a way to stop teenagers from overreacting to things and getting depressed.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by gtall ( 79522 )

        No, it isn't the mentally damaged that are only doing the killing. Sometime, mostly actually, it is your basic law abiding citizen who goes postal for fuck-all reasons.

      • Allow me to respond to your tired, unsupported rant with a tired, supported rant: When guns were easy for anyone to get there were almost no school shootings in the US.

        • Assault weapons were not prevalent before the school shootings became a daily event either. One of the safest times in US history was when Clinton enacted the assault weapons ban for a decade. Perhaps we might have safe times if that were enacted without a sunset provision?

        • When guns were easy for anyone to get

          You seem to be suggesting that guns are not easy for anyone to get right now... I've never heard this claim before. If that is indeed what you're claiming, it seems to be false [thetrace.org].

          I'm not sure how you'd measure how easy something is, but how often people do that thing seems like a reasonable proxy. And people are buying more guns than ever.

    • I would think the main problem is that poor kids see no way of having the things rich people have than to take it with violence.

      Give a way for poor kids to get access to education, a career and a meaningful life, and the amount of violence and drugs will naturally go down.

      • Re: Stupid people will be stupid. What else is new (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ArmoredDragon ( 3450605 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @01:59PM (#63690595)

        I really don't think that's going to do anything for cases like this. rsilvergun keeps repeating this like a broken record and it still sounds just as nonsense. I still remember him saying something to the effect of if people had education and a job they wouldn't shoplift, as if people with education and a job never shoplift.

        More interesting about this story is that some of these ghost guns were being manufactured by a 16 year old, who was then selling them to other 16 year olds. It sounds like he had a job that he liked already. And as for the people doing the shooting? They weren't shooting to get nice things, they were shooting over, among other things, drug deals gone bad, possibly even a turf war.

        The first part of getting an education is that you have to actually want one. People in this kind of mindset typically don't actually want that. There's a whole subculture around being a petty thug. We had people like you shouting "RACISM!" when Anthony Stokes was declined for a heart transplant, and then this happened after you guys got your way:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        The guy didn't want college. He totally could have had it if he wanted it, no doubt about that. But those social media pictures said everything about what he wanted. So instead of going to college, he tries to rob a woman at gunpoint, attempts to put a bullet in her head before running off with her car, nearly striking a pedestrian, and fortunately only killing himself in the process.

        I remember watching that video where two guys tried to run over a lady because they wanted her rolex, and one commenter said "this is what happens when people get desperate" despite that...they're wearing nice clothes and tried to run her over with a dodge challenger...they really didn't look very desperate.

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

        I can hear you screaming at the monitor "But but if we just gave organized crime an education and a job everything would be different!" so stupid and naive TBH.

        • You can't fix every single person in the world. There's always going to be someone at the far wings of whatever personality traits lead towards a greater propensity for criminal behavior, but actual education would go a long way towards reducing a variety of different sorts of crime.

          When you have people "graduating" high school who are illiterate and can't do anything but the most basic math, there aren't a lot of career paths open to them. Gangs and drug dealers don't care about anyone's GPA.

  • Wow that's a lot (Score:4, Insightful)

    by systemd-anonymousd ( 6652324 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @11:45AM (#63690147)

    >Everytown for Gun Safety compiled a list of more than 50 incidents involving teens and ghost guns since 2019. Among them:

    Holy shit, 0.00005M, with a population of 334.2M. So a motivated political group was only able to find "50 incidents" in 4 1/2 years, and those aren't deaths, just incidents, at least two of which were deaths.

    Please, take my rights away from me, Mommy Federal government!! We need to protect the subset of 50 people!

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Everytown is a Bloomberg sponsored anti-gun group that came out of nowhere. With the money that was spent for anti-2A stuff, any stats can be cooked up, even bogus ones.

      Lets be real. I have more to fear from a construction worker's nailgun across the street than a 3D printed ghost gun.

    • Re: Wow that's a lot (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 1s44c ( 552956 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @12:21PM (#63690265)

      At which point would you consider this enough of a problem to outlaw selling gun parts to anyone with no checks? 5 thousand shootings? 5 million? Never?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by GFS666 ( 6452674 )

        At which point would you consider this enough of a problem to outlaw selling gun parts to anyone with no checks? 5 thousand shootings? 5 million? Never?

        Uhmmm...no disrespect intended, but society makes judgements all the time on where/when it is best to apply rules and regulations to stop deaths. It has to as some instances are so infrequent that the cost to society to regulate it is much much greater than the cost to not regulate it/just let it go. I'll give you the greatest example of this. It's pools. Pools kill a lot of kids. Up until just a couple of year ago, pools killed much more children than firearms. If society really wanted to "protect the chil

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by gtall ( 79522 )

      It isn't that you deserve gun-rights, it is that we cannot trust you won't get all pissy and start shooting people for some reason. We don't trust you.

      • Who's "we"?
        You and the voices in your head?

      • You can measure trust. The highest-trust areas of the country have the most legal gun ownership and the least crime. The lowest-trust have the least legal gun ownership and the most crime--and the politicians there yell that they'll fix the problem if we give them just a little more power. You see, the problem is that selfish people keep claiming they have rights and aren't giving the government more power.

  • What matters is that the Second Amendment was not violated. That is all that matters, right?

  • make the drugs legal and the dealer issues drop big time

    • I can tell you that in Canada, it's worst and worst since drugs are legal. There's more and more violence and gunshot than before.

  • Any time there is a problem with an object or substance, the easy answer seems to be ... Ban It!
    Basic economics suggests that this is a futile strategy
    As long as there is demand, supply will be found
    The only thing the government can do is raise the price and divert profits to criminals

  • Ghost Guns (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cstacy ( 534252 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @12:19PM (#63690257)

    So-called "ghost guns" are just guns that lack a paper trail. It can be well-argued that the paper trail is not very useful, anyway. But one reason that some of these guns don't have a paper trail is because they don't have a serial number. They are usually made by just assembling traditionally manufactured parts. (Or just grinding the serial numbers off a commercially made gun.)

    The real "problem" with "ghost guns" is that in the near future everybody will have a 3D printing/milling machine in their garage. At the moment, it only costs a couple thousand dollars. So you won't need any skill at all to just "print" all the guns you want. You can do it now, but the economics (for the criminal segment) have not yet shifted from the traditional methods.

    The way they always talk about it, fussing about useless serial numbers and such, I don't think the police quite comprehend this reality of fundamentally limitless gun manufacturing.

    And even though the government will mandate that all 3D printing machines maintain a real-time connection and report everything you make, and an AI will figure out if it could be a weapon...well, we know how well that's going to work out.

    Clearly, public safety and crime reduction needs to come from a different angle than how we address it now.

    • I don't think "everybody will have a 3D printing/milling machine in their garage" in the near future. Most people I know don't even have a box of tools in their garage that they know how to use.

      But that's immaterial to this situation which has to do with children buying guns online.

    • Clearly, public safety and crime reduction needs to come from a different angle than how we address it now.

      Hmm, yeah, it's almost as if something other then technology has changed.

      Remember all those school massacres at the Walnut Grove schoolhouse? Where all the teenagers (almost) had easy access to guns? What's that? No?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by OzPeter ( 195038 )

      Clearly, public safety and crime reduction needs to come from a different angle than how we address it now.

      The real problem is a society that accepts uncontrolled violence as a way to "solve" problems. This isn't limited to just guns. There are innumerable videos on the interwebs that show road rage incidents escalating from a simple raised middle finger to deliberately running someone off the road. But there also have been a slew of recent road rage incidents whereby someone shoots at someone else just because they looked at them wrong.

    • Simply grinding off the SN shouldn't doesn't make the SN completely unreadable, you can usually still process/etch the receiver and recover the SN. However the agency may not think it's worth the effort. Also could just be an old/antique firearm that were "siezed" from gramps when he got dementia and was moved into a care facility.

      Firearms are relatively simple mechanisms, and manufacturing tools are more versatile and capable then ever. Ghost guns aren't preventable via regulation. Really the only reason

  • Some countries banned copy machines.
    I'm sure it reduced copyright violations, but I still think it was a bad idea.

    The value of a machine that can make a metal part from a design I download from the internet is very high.
    There's no reasonable way to police it. Proving that is sort of the point of the Ghost Gunner.

    Rather than try and legislate reality, I'd rather lawmakers accept that CnC machines exist and people can do things with them they don't like.
    The machine is a symptom of the problem, not the proble

  • At least if you don't care too much about precision or safety. It's basically a tube with a feeding mechanism and a way to ignite the bullet. That's it.

    If precision and your own safety is secondary, you can essentially build that from a few metal parts you can order online or pick up in any hardware store and a few plastic parts you can print in your 3D printer.

  • It’s ridiculously easy (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Tjp($)pjT ( 266360 ) on Sunday July 16, 2023 @01:03PM (#63690405)
    and can’t be stopped. Under $20 and a trip to a hardware store and you can make a slam fire shotgun.

    For about $100 you can from raw materials make a semi-auto pistol.

    You would have to regulate every possible raw material, down to springs in ball point pens, blocks of steel, etc. Then regulate means to make those items, like home forges and foundry equipment. Which means fire bricks etc.

    Afghanistan tribesmen made AK-47 clones from wrecked trucks. Axels became barrels, sheet metal the frame and rails. Leaf springs the more solid steel parts. For the most part built with hand tools, like hack saws and files, and basic auto repair shop tools.

    The knowledge is out there. It will keep happening until we address WHY it is happening.

  • ... you put a projectile in it, and propel it with explosive.

    Talk about trying to put the genie back in the bottle ...

  • Gangbangers and other kids are this lazy now?

  • I'm not in the US, but I always have to laugh at the calls for "banning guns, whenever an article like this crops up. That genie is out of the bottle, and the bottle has been smashed. Too many guns, and anyway, guns are stupidly easy to make.

    More to the point: this all has nothing whatsoever to do with this article. The kids making these purchases, and the people selling to them, are already breaking the law. Making their actions more illegal isn't going to change anyuthing. Here's a quote from one of the

  • Science fiction is way ahead of this. One day SOON everyone will have a 3-d printer. It will destroy the bullshit false gods of consumerism, regulation, and information asymmetry. Clothes that don't fit you perfectly will be a thing of the past. Having to go to a hardware store to match a part you need for your home/car will be a thing of the past. And yes, the gubermint's ability to retard innovation and empowerment of the individual under the guise of 'safety' will be a thing of the past, as well. F

  • As a Canadian (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Kernel Kurtz ( 182424 )
    I used to believe that sensible gun laws were possible, where ordinary people could enjoy their hobby while minimizing risk to society (and the understanding of course that criminals will always have access to guns regardless of any laws).

    With gun ownership under massive attack by the current government in my country I have quickly become disabused of the idea that there is any middle ground possible. My advice now to American gun owners is to never give an inch. None at all. Reasonable compromise is

  • You know what else these kids had in common? Bad parenting. Let's go fix the root cause instead of trying to remove rights from law-abiding citizens.

  • You could mail-order a WWII Sten submachine gun from an add in the back of a magazine in the 1970's for less than $20 (about $160US today). No license no registration.Gun violence is actually lower today then back then even so there weren't mass killings using submachine guns back then either.

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