Some people hate the term “ghost gun” for privately made firearms. I’ve run into a few that like it and want to own it completely. Regardless, what we call these firearms is the least of our concerns, really.
What we really need to focus on is the almost religious crusade against these firearms by the usual suspects.
Take Virginia, where anti-gun lawmakers are trying to make it the California of the East Coast. Unsurprisingly, Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who ran on things like affordability but hasn’t done anything to address that promise, just signed her latest anti-gun measure. This time, it’s about the so-called ghost guns.
Virginia gun owners just got another reminder that when anti-gun politicians talk about “public safety,” what they often mean is more control over peaceable citizens.
Governor Abigail Spanberger has signed HB40 into law, adding Virginia to the growing list of states targeting so-called “ghost guns,” the media-approved label for privately made firearms (PMFs) and unserialized frames or receivers. Under the bill, the Commonwealth is moving to ban the manufacture, transfer, sale, importation, and eventually even possession of unserialized firearms and unfinished frames or receivers unless they are brought into the government-approved serialization system. Most of the law takes effect January 1, 2027, while the possession ban takes effect July 1, 2027.
For generations, Americans have made their own firearms for lawful personal use. It is part of the country’s history, part of the gun culture, and part of the broader understanding that free citizens do not need government permission to build lawful arms for themselves. HB40 tries to end that.
Virginia’s new law goes well beyond banning guns that anti-gun politicians love to talk about. It creates a new section of law targeting unserialized firearms and unfinished frames or receivers. The bill makes it unlawful to knowingly import, purchase, sell, transfer, manufacture, or assemble covered items without a valid serial number, and it separately makes possession of an unserialized firearm or covered frame or receiver unlawful once the delayed possession provision takes effect. The bill also lays out a process under which a federal firearms licensee can imprint a serial number and retain transaction records.
The issue here is that once every gun is serialized–and only the ones intended for lawful purposes will ever get this treatment–then every gun will be in a database that can, in time, be accessed.
Every step toward serializing all lawfully held firearms is a step closer toward registration, in effect if not in law.
As it stands, every new gun sale requires someone to fill out a Form 4473. This is what “gun tracing” references, for the record. As it stands, though, this might be a de facto registration, but it’s a terrible one. If I buy a gun from a gun store, then sell it to someone a couple of years later directly, the chain stops right then and there. The gun is untraceable. This is part of why they want universal background checks. That will allow the chain to be picked up and carried forward.
Privately made firearms bypass this from the start, and that’s why it’s a problem for anti-gun lawmakers.
If they can force all so-called ghost guns into the system, then they have a way to keep track of them.
But only for those lawfully used. The criminals who make and buy these guns won’t be getting serial numbers for them. Those will continue to exist outside of the system.
Now, about the whole “no grandfather clause” thing, I can’t say I’m surprised. How would a grandfather clause on these even work, realistically? There’s no way to tell if a gun was made before or after the law takes effect.
For me, that’s all the more reason this shouldn’t be a law. It’s never going to impact the bad actors in society, just the law-abiding, and that’s where the whole “public safety” claim for gun control as a whole falls down.
Plus, as the original post notes, the Supreme Court has made it clear that you can’t just scream “public safety” and infringe on people’s rights just because you want to. That talisman has no magic left, thankfully.
Spanberger signed it, but now is the time to fight it.
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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