One less ghost gun retailer will be in the business of illegally selling gun parts in New York City, Mayor Eric Adams announced on Tuesday.

We have a rights granted to us by our creator. One of those rights is the right to self defense. There is no limit on how you defend yourself. Hopefully you will keep the collateral damage to a minimum.

In these United States that right is embodied in the second amendment. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The second amendment does not say muskets. It does not say muzzle loaders or firearms. It doesn’t even mention knives, swords, clubs or axes. It says “arms”.

A few years ago one of the gun hating state of Massachusetts had their ban on stun guns declared unconstitutional. Stun guns are arms and as such are protected under the second amendment. SJC: Stun guns protected under Second Amendment

The newest horrible, no good, double plus ungood, awful threat to the people of this country is a gun that doesn’t have a serial number on it. More importantly, a serial number that the BATFE has a record of. The number of crimes being committed with guns that have no serial numbers is increased vastly.

Mostly because when you go from less than 10 to more than 100 you get huge percentage changes. “Crimes committed with ghost guns has jumped 400% since 2019” could mean that they went from 1 to 4 or from 100 to 400 or from 1000 to 4000. We don’t know because they work hard to hide the true numbers. If the number had climbed from 4000 to 5000 you can be sure it would be described as “more than a 1000 more ghost guns were used in crimes last year…”

Emotional blackmail is a good description of this method of manipulating people to fear something they have no reason to fear. We use to call it “dead baby stories”. These are the stories that were told before the Internet to keep you from doing something. It always had the same form, “Your aunt Jill’s husband’s brother’s son-in-law knows a family whose baby died because he was fed a strawberry. Never give strawberries to a baby or it will die!”

The gun rights infringers are very careful to not actually tell you what they mean when the say “Ghost Gun”.

What they mean is parts. What they mean are objects that might become a firearm. The ATF is currently playing the same game, trying to make parts firearms so they can force registration.

There are a couple of books out there that describe exactly how to use bits and pieces purchased at the local hardware store to create a working sub-machine gun. While it would be nice to have fancy tooling to make them, they are designed to be made with the simplest of tools. A drill and file being the two primary tools required.

The problem is always going to be “When does this piece of metal go from being a lump of metal to a firearm?”

As part of a settlement, Salvo Technologies – doing business as Florida-based 80P builder – agreed to stop selling New York City residents the illegal and untraceable firearms known as ghost guns, which are assembled from gun part kits often sold online.

“Untraceable” is the fear word.

Police procedural shows are very predictable. NCIS was better than most but still. Just about every other week you would hear a conversation like “We’ve identified that the gun that fired the shot is a Glock 49. There are only 9 registered owners of Glock 49s in the area, we need to check them out.”

Or on a really bad day they might have over a 100 registered owners. So some magic nerd in the back would use arcane incantations to have the list filtered down to just left handed 39 year olds whose junk hangs to the right.

There is no gun registry. Some states have one but there is no federal gun registry. Many people believe there is but that’s because Hollywood told them that there is.

For a time Maryland required that every new gun sold in the state supply an example fired case from that gun. This was going to allow the police to solve more crimes. They would be able to pick up a casing at a crime scene and instantly track it back to the person that owned the gun.

Except that it didn’t work even once. They canceled the boondoggle after a number of years and millions of dollars.

The number of times that a gun trace actually leads to an arrest is unknown. The data isn’t collected.

The AG of New York is ordering companies selling parts kits to not sell to people in NY because they might be turned into a real gun and that gun might be used in a crime and they might recover that gun and they might not know who did the crime and they might have been able to trace the gun to the first buyer if only that gun had been registered and had a serial number.

There are firearms that are parts of collections that are multiple buyers removed from the last time that firearm was on an FFLs books. Everytime there is a gun ban scare people decide that a little horse trading amongst friends might be a good idea. So a firearm that was purchased 30 years ago is traded to somebody that in turn trades it to somebody else and forgets about it.

The only thing they have is the emotional blackmail. We have to stand up to their screeching and whining.

[In 2011], the Connecticut legislature estimated there were 372,000 rifles in the state of the sort that might be classified as “assault weapons,” and two million plus high-capacity magazines. Many more have been sold in the gun-buying boom since then. But by the close of registration at the end of 2013, state officials received around 50,000 applications for “assault weapon” registrations, and 38,000 applications for magazines.

Non-compliance is an act of defiance. The law is “shall not be infringed”. Be prepared to fight for your rights.

Settlement blocks another company from selling ghost guns in NYC