SACRAMENTO, Calif. — One day after a gunman opened fire on a subway train in Brooklyn, and eight days after six people were killed in a mass shooting in downtown Sacramento, gun safety activists joined city and state leaders to call for passage of a new ghost gun bill making its way through the California legislature.
AB 1621 would stop the sale of individual parts used to make untraceable and unregistered firearms built at home with so-called buy build shoot kits until they are regulated by the federal government.
“Ghost guns represent the fastest-growing and most significant public safety crisis in our country right now,” Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts said Wednesday during a web conference with Los Angeles City Attorney Mike Feuer and AB 1621 author Mike Gipson, who represents the communities of Watts, Compton, Carson and other South LA neighborhoods in the California Assembly.
California has some of the toughest gun violence prevention laws in the country. Still, 3,100 people die and another 6,800 are wounded due to gun violence each year, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. Increasingly, those guns are built from kits.
“Ghost guns are rapidly becoming the crime gun of choice for criminals,” Feuer said.
Last year alone, 1,921 ghost guns were confiscated in LA — a 136% increase over the 813 the LA Police Department confiscated during the prior year. So many were seized that the LAPD now refers to the phenomenon as an epidemic.
More than 100 violent crimes in 2021 were committed using ghost guns, including 24 murders, 8 attempted murders, 60 assaults with deadly weapons and 20 armed robberies, according to the LAPD’s 2021 Ghost Gun Report.
About a quarter of all firearms seized by the LAPD are ghost guns. Of those, the majority are made by a single manufacturer: Polymer 80, which Feuer’s office has sued.
“We want to go after the supply of these weapons,” Feuer said. “There’s a demand on the street, but if we can cut off the supply, we go a long way to diminishing the threat that unseized and untraceable ghost guns pose.”
More than 100 companies sell buy build shoot kits for ghost guns, according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety. The kits can be turned into useable firearms in less than an hour, even by someone who has no experience putting them together.
Wednesday’s call for action comes two days after the Biden administration announced a rule intended to halt the proliferation of ghost guns by making sure the pieces used to build them are legally defined as firearms.
The law effectively means that ghost gun parts are traceable because their component parts will include serial numbers. It also mandates that the parts can only be sold by licensed dealers required to conduct background checks.
“The federal rule will regulate ghost guns like any other firearm, but it doesn’t mean further state action isn’t still needed,” Watts said.
AB 1621 seeks to halt the sale of firearm precursor parts until they are serialized under federal law. The bill goes before the California Assembly’s Public Safety Committee next week.
Last November, the LA City Council voted unanimously in favor of an ordinance that prohibits the purchase, possession or transportation or ghost guns or their non-serialized parts. Violations are punishable with up to six months of jail time and/or a fine of as much as $1,000.