The term “ghost gun” originally applied to privately made firearms, and then because they lacked a serial number that could be traced. While tracing is talked about as a vital police tool, its usefulness is vastly overstated.
Now, the term is applied to any firearm that doesn’t have a readable firearm. One that’s scratched out is just as likely to be called a “ghost gun” as one made in a home workshop.
And the arguments against these guns are that they’re really attractive to criminals who can’t buy a gun in a gun store because of existing federal laws. On the surface, I can see why they’d say that, but the numbers that have been released over the years show that this accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total firearms used by criminals.
But are they a problem? Well, a recent study suggests that they might be, but not when it comes to homicides.
Ghost guns are linked to higher suicide rates but not to increases in homicides, according to a new study from New York University researchers.
The findings come as New York officials push for tighter restrictions on untraceable firearms, including a proposal from Gov. Kathy Hochul to require 3D printers sold in the state to include technology that blocks unlicensed gun production.
The peer-reviewed study, published this month in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, is the first to examine how ghost guns relate to firearm death rates.
Researchers analyzed data on ghost gun recoveries across California’s 58 counties from 2014 to 2023. They found for every 20 ghost guns recovered per 100,000 residents, the firearm suicide rate increased by 6% the following year.
Diana Silver, a coauthor of the study and a professor at NYU’s School of Global Public Health, said ghost guns may appeal to people who can’t pass background checks or want to avoid interacting with others when acquiring a firearm.
“People who may be prone to suicide — who either can’t get guns or don’t have the money to get guns — find this easier than engaging with other people to purchase a gun or go through the background check,” she said.
That’s an interesting take.
However, it doesn’t look like Silver looked at the overall suicide rate, so we don’t know if it was an actual increase in suicides or just in the choice of tool used. To her credit, though, Silver does state that her study just found an association, not a “cause and effect” kind of thing, which I can at least respect because, yeah, it’s a correlation.
And it needs a lot more research, including in states other than California.
Still, suicides aren’t what anti-gunners try to sell us on with “ghost gun” bans. That’s all about crime, and Silver’s study makes it pretty clear that so-called ghost guns don’t seem to correlate to higher homicide rates.
And why would it?
So far, there’s no evidence that privately made firearms are the only way these bad guys can get guns. Since we know that the percentages of these guns compared to the total recovered by law enforcement is paltry, there’s absolutely no way it could have a major impact on the numbers.
Yet the fact that there are no significant differences tells us that, yeah, those who get so-called ghost guns are simply making a choice compared to something else available on the black market.
The downside to these results, though, is that we’re likely to start hearing about banning “ghost guns” as the answer to suicides or something equally stupid.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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