Teenagers use 'ghost guns' to stay 'invisible'

Crimes by US youngsters assembling firearms sans serial numbers on rise

They ordered parts of guns from different websites under aliases and assembled guns at home, through a simple process known as creating "ghost guns" that have no traceable serial numbers.

At their age, the three teenage boys were legally prohibited from buying guns from a licensed gun store.

On the evening of Nov 18, 2022, they got into a car in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota.

One of the teenagers took out the gun he had just made by himself. He tried to shoot outside the vehicle, but the gunfire hit two of his friends inside the car. One of them, a 17-year-old, later died in a hospital, Brooklyn Park police said. The police arrested the other two teenagers and believed both had ghost guns, CBS News reported.

"We believe the intended target was outside the vehicle. The unintended targets were inside the vehicle," Police Chief Mark Bruley told CBS.

Last year, police departments seized at least 25,785 ghost guns nationwide — a tenfold increase from 2016, the Justice Department said.

The number of suspected ghost guns recovered by law enforcement and submitted to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, or ATF, for tracing increased by more than 1,000 percent between 2017 and 2021. From 2020 to 2021, the figure more than doubled.

Due to the absence of serial numbers on ghost guns, the ATF can trace less than 1 percent of the firearms back to their original purchasers, according to the ATF.

"An ongoing concern for me as the police chief when we combat violent crime is how easy it is for individuals to obtain guns," Bruley said in a news conference.

Amid the surge in ghost guns, US teenagers have discovered how easily they can obtain parts for one. They have been purchasing, assembling and using the homemade firearms with alarming frequency, as reported by Everytown for Gun Safety, a group opposed to gun violence.

"Let me remind you these are 17-year-old children who are not only able to order gun parts, but quickly assemble them in their bedroom, creating working firearms," Bruley told CBS News.

There are nearly 100 manufacturers selling parts, or full kits, which can be made into guns with no serial numbers, according to a list compiled by Everytown and reported by The Washington Post.

Easy to make

Meanwhile, online sellers are boasting about how easy it is to make a ghost gun at home. One online seller of an AK-47 kit claimed it was "one of the simplest processes to date". The seller even provides a how-to video on the sale page, an Everytown report found.

Another seller advertising to build an AR-15 kit said it "doesn't take too long. Within an hour or two, you should be breaking it in at the range".

The top five instructional videos uploaded on YouTube, providing guidance on finishing either a frame or receiver, have gained more than 3 million views, according to the Everytown report.

A Washington Post story published earlier this month detailed an incident in Virginia where two 17-year-old teenagers were killed. An 18-year-old classmate was responsible for the shooting, using an unserialized, self-assembled ghost gun bought from the ghost gun seller 80P Builder.

The families of the two teenagers, along with Everytown for Gun Safety, are now suing 80P Builder in Florida, and the manufacturer, Polymer80 in Nevada, for "gross negligence in providing a teenager with a weapon".

The ATF estimated that Polymer80 was responsible for more than 88 percent of the ghost guns recovered by police between 2017 and 2021, the Post reported.

The ATF also has connected ghost guns to 692 homicides and nonfatal shootings, which include instances of mass killings and school shootings through 2021, according to the Post.

That is just the tip of the iceberg, Benjamin Hayes, former ATF special agent and branch manager at the ATF National Tracing Center, told CBS News.

"We continue to produce so many firearms, and they are just pouring into the public domain. The abundance of these firearms and the myriad of environments in which they reside make it easy for someone with criminal intent to obtain a gun," Hayes said.

Last year, the Biden administration and the ATF attempted to regulate ghost guns by mandating sellers to serialize "ready-to-build "ghost gun kits and conducting background checks on potential buyers. However, a federal court overturned the ban in July.

minluzhang@chinadailyusa.com