Joe Biden's gun sanity

A ghost gun being assembled for a story in the New York Times.

Have you heard of ghost guns?  No, they’re not used in Netflix series to kill poltergeists or in C-movie slasher-fests to slay zombies.  Ghost guns are firearms you can make from a kit that you can buy on the internet and have sent by mail or FedEx to your own home.  You don’t need a driver’s license.  You don’t have to pass a background check.  You can even pay for the things with Bitcoin in order to completely obscure who you are or where you live and anything else you don’t want law enforcement authorities to know about you.

In other words, ghost guns are ideal if you’re a right-wing loon intent on the “new Civil War” they’re constantly yapping about, or if you’re a foreign terrorist who having arrived in the United States, wants a gun to wreak some havoc with.  All you need is an address and some money and you, too, can buy a kit and put together a perfectly legal deadly weapon without anyone in authority knowing anything about you or the weapon.  That’s because a ghost gun, assembled from a kit, doesn’t have to have a serial number.  That’s right.  You can mail-order yourself a kit and put together a gun that nobody can ever trace back to you, no matter what you do with it.

Perfect, isn’t it?  The gun-nuts have come up with a way for criminals to get hold of untraceable, unlicensed firearms completely under the radar.

Well, today our sane president – it’s probably as strange to read that phrase as it is to write it – his name is Joe Biden, by the way, announced that he’s going to have the Department of Justice issue a rule that will begin to control the ownership and use of so-called ghost guns.  The proposed rule will require the components of the kits from which the guns are assembled to have serial numbers – all of the components, not just a stamp on the receiver like a regular gun has.  And the rule will legally classify the kits as firearms making them subject to background checks and other rules which apply to conventional guns.

That makes sense, doesn’t it?  Well, as we know, things that make sense when it comes to guns don’t always come to pass.  “We’ve got a long way to go, it seems like we always have a long way to go,” President Biden said today in the Rose Garden as he announced the proposed rules to curb ghost guns and other measures.  Biden also said that his administration will propose a rule that regulates pistols sold with so-called “stabilizing braces” which are actually stocks that transform them into short-barreled rifles.  A pistol with an “arm-brace” was used by the gunman in Boulder, Colorado, to kill 6 Asian women and two others at massage parlors last month.  The Biden rule would regulate pistols sold with so-called “stabilizing braces” as short-barreled rifles, making them subject to the National Firearms Act, which requires the payment of a $200 fee and a more complete background check in order to buy such a weapon.

Biden also announced that the Department of Justice will publish model “red flag” legislation for states which wish to pass such laws.  So-called “red flag” laws allow law enforcement officials or family members to petition a court to remove firearms from people who present a danger to themselves or others.  This might include people accused or convicted of domestic violence or people threatening to commit suicide or to shoot a family member.

Additionally, Biden announced that the Department of Justice will soon produce a comprehensive report on firearms trafficking, something the Department has not done since the year 2000.

These all sound like rational, sensible things to do, don’t they?  Well, so do the two gun-control control laws the House of Representatives passed last month, largely along party lines, which of course face certain death in the senate with its current rules regarding the filibuster.  Biden has a long history of sanity when it comes to guns, including backing the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act in 1993, and a year later, helping to enact the landmark ban on assault weapons, which was able to pass only with a 10-year “sunset” provision, causing the law to expire in 2004.

“This is just a start,” Biden said in the Rose Garden. “We have a lot of work to do.”

Isn’t that amazing?  A President of the United States stood up in front of the press in the Rose Garden, and he didn’t tell any lies, and he made some proposals to help control the proliferation of unregistered, unmarked, uncontrollable guns in this country.  Every word that came out of his mouth made sense and he didn’t yell at the members of the media who were present and he didn’t refer to them as “enemies of the people” or any other of that kind of nonsense.

Whatever is this country coming to?