Kelsey McClellan / The New York Times
A Glock-style ghost gun at the San Francisco district attorney’s office on Nov. 12, 2021. Ghost guns — untraceable firearms without serial numbers, assembled from components bought online — are increasingly becoming the lethal weapon of easy access for those legally barred from buying or owning guns around the country.
Monday, Nov. 15, 2021 | 2 a.m.
CHULA VISTA, Calif. — Max Mendoza’s parents awakened just after dawn to a gunshot and ran from their bedroom to find their 12-year-old son propped against the couch, eyes wide in pain, terror and surprise.
“It’s the real one,” Max whispered, clutching his chest, seemingly astounded that a weapon resembling a toy could end his life in an instant.
But it did. Investigators in this city just south of San Diego are still trying to determine exactly what happened on that Saturday morning in July — if the seventh grader accidentally shot himself or if a 15-year-old friend discharged it while showing it off.
What is certain is the kind of weapon that killed Max. It was a “ghost gun.”
Ghost guns — untraceable firearms without serial numbers, assembled from components bought online — are increasingly becoming the lethal weapon of easy access for those legally barred from buying or owning guns around the country. The criminal underground has long relied on stolen weapons with sanded-off serial numbers, but ghost guns represent a digital-age upgrade, and they are especially prevalent in coastal blue states with strict firearm laws.
Nowhere is that truer than in California, where their proliferation has reached epidemic proportions, according to local and federal law enforcement officials in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco. Over the past 18 months, officials said, ghost guns accounted for 25% to 50% of firearms recovered at crime scenes. The vast majority of suspects caught with them were legally prohibited from having guns.
“I’ve been on the force for 30 years next month, and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lt. Paul Phillips of the San Diego Police Department. By the beginning of October, he said, the department had recovered almost 400 ghost guns, about double the total for all of 2020 with nearly three months to go in the year.
Law enforcement officials are not exactly sure why their use is taking off. But they believe it is basically a matter of a new, disruptive technology gradually gaining traction in a market, then rocketing up when buyers catch on. This isn’t just happening on the West Coast. Since January 2016, about 25,000 privately made firearms have been confiscated by local and federal law enforcement agencies nationwide.
Ghost guns, and the niche industry that produces them, have flourished because of a loophole in federal regulation: The parts used to build “privately made firearms” are classified as components, not actual guns, which means that online buyers are not required to undergo background checks or register the weapons. That makes them a powerful magnet for those banned from gun ownership, including felons, domestic abusers subject to orders of protection, the mentally ill and children, like the teenager who brought his gun into Max Mendoza’s apartment, according to police.
Closing that loophole is the focus of new regulations ordered by President Joe Biden. The rules would essentially treat ghost guns as traditional firearms — requiring core components to be engraved with serial numbers, imposing background checks and requiring online purchasers to pick up their orders at federally licensed gun shops.
Law enforcement officials in California think that the rules would do much to keep ghost guns out of the hands of criminals and children. “It’s definitely going to stop some of the most obvious problems,” said the Los Angeles city attorney, Mike Feuer, who is suing a leading gun-parts vendor.
But the new rules, which are likely to be challenged in court by gun rights groups, are not expected to be implemented until early next year. And gun control groups have raised doubts about the robustness of enforcement by federal firearms regulators.
What’s more, while the rules would create a set of legal roadblocks, law enforcement officials say the extralegal pipeline for parts is sure to adapt and thrive. There is a huge surfeit of supplies in circulation, and at the same time, the increasing availability of 3D printers, which can create gun components, has opened a new backdoor source of illegal weapons.
The epidemic seems to be disproportionately affecting young people, as purchasers, perpetrators and victims. Two years ago, a 16-year-old student walked into Saugus High School, north of Los Angeles, and killed two teenagers with a .45-caliber semi-automatic pistol assembled from a kit before turning the weapon on himself — a case that, more than any other, elevated the issue to national attention.
A Deadly Loophole
The decadeslong debate over gun control in Washington revolves around the regulation of traditional firearms. Ghost guns pose a more elemental question: What makes a gun a gun?
Every semi-automatic weapon consists of two main parts: the movable upper “slide,” which sits on the barrel, and the “receiver” or “frame.” Under federal law, any frame or receiver considered 80% finished is a functional firearm subject to the same regulations as a fully assembled gun. If it is less than 80% finished, it is not subject to the same federal safeguards.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives judges each component on a case-by-case basis. But critics have long accused the agency of failing to aggressively investigate companies that sell kits with everything necessary to quickly assemble a ghost gun.
“I think a lot of us thought this was a problem that we had 10 years to deal with, when it was, in reality, more like two,” said David Chipman, a former ATF agent who was withdrawn as Biden’s nominee to head the bureau in September amid fierce opposition from the gun lobby.
Chipman had pledged to make the issue a priority, and his failed nomination has left gun control advocates wondering how energetically the agency will enforce the new regulations. Nonetheless, the ATF has worked on dozens of ghost-gun busts with local police departments and has recently cracked down on Polymer80, the Nevada-based industry leader whose weapons accounted for the majority of ghost guns found at California crime scenes in 2019.
The company sells a wide range of components online, but the ATF focused on one of its most popular kits: the $590 “Buy, Build and Shoot” kit that contained almost everything needed to make a functional Glock-style pistol.
In December, the ATF raided the company’s headquarters near Reno, citing a failure by the company to submit the kits for regulatory approval.
The raid has not yet resulted in charges. But the company has stopped selling the kits.
Crimes and Pastimes
Steven R. Ely, a 69-year-old retired high school teacher, had never really heard about ghost guns until he was almost killed by one.
A little after 10 p.m. April 24, he rounded a corner in San Diego’s bustling Gaslamp Quarter, heard four or five loud claps and felt something plink against his right side.
Ely saw a spreading patch of red. His knees gave way. He would spend weeks in the hospital.
Ely was among the victims of a flash of carnage that began, investigators say, when a man named Travis Sarreshteh, 32, walked up to a hotel parking attendant, Justice Boldin, and, without warning, shot him with a Polymer80 pistol. Boldin, 28, died almost instantly.
Then Sarreshteh, who pleaded not guilty after being charged with murder, brushed shoulders with a group of friends from New Jersey. He wheeled and fired, slightly wounding two of the men, police say. A third man was injured in the arm, lung, spleen and stomach. Ely was probably hit by that volley.
Police are still not sure how Sarreshteh may have gotten the weapon. But obtaining a ghost gun, they say, allowed him to dodge a background check that would have revealed a significant criminal history.
The shooting brought barely a ripple nationally. But it galvanized officials in San Diego.
“How could somebody who was barred from lawfully purchasing a firearm get a 9 millimeter gun and shoot five people in the middle of the street?” said Marni von Wilpert, a San Diego city councilor who pushed through a law banning guns without serial numbers.
Community leaders in some of the state’s violence-plagued urban neighborhoods have been sounding the alarm for the past couple of years, as teenagers snap up homemade guns for protection or as emblems of toughness.
“People aren’t buying regular guns anymore,” said Antoine Towers, who works for an anti-violence program in Oakland. “Almost all the youngsters are using ghosts.”
Early last year, Bryan Muehlberger, who lives north of Los Angeles, wanted to prove just how easily a minor could buy a gun kit online.
He ordered it using the name of his teenage daughter, Gracie, checking the boxes indicating that she was a legal buyer. The company (which he does not want to identify because it has his family’s personal information) processed the order without bothering to ensure that Gracie was older than 21, as state law requires.
“I get a box in the mail, and it says ‘Gracie Muehlberger’ right there on the label,” he said, pausing to collect himself. “I was dumbstruck.”
Gracie Muehlberger is dead. She was killed by a ghost gun, at age 15, along with 14-year-old Dominic Blackwell, in the Saugus High School shooting.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
