Why you don't trust what Media says about guns.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives shared new details on gun trends in Middle Tennessee, including ghost guns.
Ghost guns are firearms made at home, often with 3D printers. They don’t have serial numbers, making them much harder to trace, but investigators are still connecting the dots.
Every gun leaves unique markings on shell casings found at crime scenes.
ATF tracks ghost gun, glock switch use in Middle TN
Accurate but misleading. A ghost gun indeed has no serial number in its frame, but frames, serialized or not, do not leave particular markings on shells. That is part and parcel for the barrel’s chamber, extractor claw and maybe some other part of the slide.
ATF uses a system called NIBIN, which allows agents to get instant access to a national database to examine shell casings. Images are taken, then pictures are compared in the database to see whether there’s a match.
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“We can show this particular firearm that was recovered was linked to 4, 5, 6 other shootings, that suspect is a priority target for us,” ATF special agent in charge Jamey VanVliet said.
According to data from ATF, there have been more than a thousand casings entered into the database, including a small number of ghost guns, over the last few years.
Wait, how many? Funny that you say that because ATF’s NIBIN Fact Sheet shows a different number.
I guess seven million is indeed more than a thousand. One things I could not find were the metrics of cases remotely solved by the use of NIBIN or even cases prosecuted. Some examples of cases were given, but nothing firm on numbers. My guess is that it many not be the magic bullet they advertised when creating the database and going back every year for more funding.
Vanvliet believes ghost guns are trending downward after the recent crackdown on the unlicensed kits to make them.
Huh? I am trying to wrap my head about that. My guess is the agent is mentioning the issue with selling 80% Frames and the jig to finish them together which I haven’t been following much, but at the same time if the frames are being printed, the printers themself are not subject to registration although California is trying to do the stupid.
But wait! There is an even bigger fear!
Now, they’re warning about another threat: glock switches. A small device that can turn handguns into fully automatic weapons. These can also be made with 3D printers.
“They can be 3D printed for pennies on the dollar and within seconds to a minute, be able to convert some of those firearms to a fully automatic machine gun. If you put that in the hands of a violent offender or serial shooter, that’s something that’s definitely scary and keeps us up at night; it’s a big focus of ours,” Vanvliet said.
It is a good thing that them switches do not work with regular guns, right?
If we just have one more law to make this stuff illegaller…
Anyway, beware of the Ghost Guns with a Switch, they may strike at any time, anywhere.
Just a quick test is all I propose. Let's go to an indoor range after a local group of say 10 officers have used their issued sidearms for live fire. Say 100 rounds per shooter were fired, all 9mm, all from the same make and model pistol, all the same brand ammunition from the same lot, and all 10 pistols were brand new. All the brass should be swept into a bucket, then transported to wherever the scanner may be for testing. The scanner just needs to tell us (with say greater than 90% accuracy) which pistol fired which casing.
I'll be over here...holding my breath...waiting for the scanner to prove its effectiveness.
They truly are Ghost Guns, because no one has ever seen them and there is no proof that they exist...