In 2021, California was in the throes of a ghost gun crisis. Police recovered nearly 11,000 of the unserialized, untraceable firearms that year alone, a nearly seven-fold increase from just two years earlier.
Though every state in the country was experiencing a surge in crimes committed with ghost guns, California was hit particularly hard, reporting more recovered ghost guns to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives than any other state by far. From 2017 to 2021, California accounted for 53 percent of the more than 37,000 ghost guns recovered nationwide and reported to the ATF. (That number is almost certainly an undercount.)
Ghost guns went from being relatively rare to ubiquitous in a pretty short time span, accounting for more than 18 percent of all crime guns recovered in California in 2021, up from less than 1 percent in 2016. The increase was evident in crimes of all types, including a dramatic 4,600 percent increase in ghost guns recovered from gun homicides of police officers and a 1,200 percent increase from domestic violence crimes.
But in the years since, those trends have reversed. Here’s how that happened.
The surge was fueled by a fast-growing industry selling nearly complete, finish-it-yourself gun kits. These ghost gun kits posed two major regulatory and public safety problems.
First, they weren’t legally considered firearms, which meant they could be sold without licenses, background checks, serial numbers, or record-keeping requirements. Because the kits could be sold without a background check, they became popular among people who otherwise couldn’t legally buy guns.
And second, the lack of a serial number on the finished “ghost gun,” once completed, presents a significant challenge for law enforcement, which needs serial numbers to trace firearms for leads in criminal investigations.
President Joe Biden began addressing those problems shortly after taking office in 2021. In one of his first official acts on gun violence, Biden directed the ATF and Justice Department to regulate ghost guns. The agency followed up with a new rule that deemed nearly complete ghost gun kits to be firearms, required manufacturers to serialize the weapon components, and subjected those guns to background checks. It took effect in August 2022.
States, including California, began instituting strict ghost gun laws, too. That year, California law enforcement agencies reported the first decrease in ghost gun recoveries in a decade of recordkeeping. By 2023, ghost gun recoveries had fallen more than 23 percent from the 2021 high, a decline that far outpaced the decrease among other recovered crime guns.
It’s not just California. Cities and police departments elsewhere report similar trends.
I requested ghost gun data from police departments in a dozen cities to get a sense of what’s happening in other places. While several departments told me they don’t track ghost guns, the data I did get back is encouraging.
In New York City, after several years of logging increases, ghost guns recovered from crimes fell for the first time in 2023, declining 8 percent to 400 from a high of 436 in 2022, an NYPD spokesperson told me. The number so far this year stands at 382.
In Philadelphia, ghost guns recovered from crimes fell 8 percent, too, from 575 in 2022 to 526 in 2023, and are down further this year, with the total standing at 370, the city’s Police Department said.
In Baltimore, the decline has been even more dramatic: Ghost guns recovered from crimes fell 25 percent, from 516 in 2022 to 347 in 2023, a spokesperson said. So far this year, the number is 264, down another 18.5 percent when compared to the same period last year.
“We’re starting to see declines,” David Pucino, the deputy chief counsel and legal director at Giffords Law Center, told me. “That is not going to mean we’re going to suddenly have the number of those crime gun recoveries go to zero in another year. What we’re looking at — if this rule continues to be enforced — is a continuous, slow decline.”
There was another factor in the proliferation of ghost guns: the ease of constructing them. While manufacturers of ghost gun kits had argued that they had a market among hobbyist firearm builders, many of the kits could be assembled in under 30 minutes and required no more skill than assembling a piece of store-bought furniture.
“They made these kits incredibly user-friendly, and they were able to skirt and circumvent existing law,” said Christian Heyne, chief programs and policy officer at Brady, a gun violence prevention organization.
It has become increasingly clear that the main draw for ghost guns was not craft, but the lack of a background check and no serialization. Earlier this year, The Trace reported that Polymer80 — once the country’s largest manufacturer of kits — had effectively shuttered after facing lawsuits and a market largely scuttled by the Biden administration’s ghost gun rule.
Notably, the rule doesn’t prohibit anyone who can legally possess guns from buying a gun kit to finish at home. It just requires those nearly complete kits to be serialized and subject to a background check.
“If there was a large market of people who enjoyed the experience of building a mostly complete gun into a fully complete gun, you wouldn’t expect to see a big drop-off in sales,” Pucino said. “But they did have a big drop-off in sales.”
“Their market is not simple hobbyists who are enjoying the process of going from the proverbial 80 percent to 100 percent,” he added. “No, it’s people who are sourcing these things because they don’t want to comply with common laws. Why don’t they want to comply with gun laws? In significant part, it is because they’re gun traffickers. They’re supplying guns to the criminal market.”
Polymer80’s kits and others like them were responsible for the vast majority of ghost guns used in crimes. Polymer80 alone produced more than 88 percent of the identifiable ghost guns that were recovered at crime scenes nationwide between 2017 and 2021, according to the ATF and the Department of Justice.
“The rule has largely been effective on the supply side by stopping companies from selling those products to people who wouldn’t be able to pass a background check,” Pucino said. “Or don’t want to have a serial number on the gun because they’re supplying those guns to the crime market.”
Even if most were not bought with the intent of being used in a crime or being trafficked, a general reduction in the overall supply of the most accessible ghost guns means that fewer untraceable firearms find their way to the black market.
“Just general availability of anything makes it more likely to be used in a crime. Because if it’s out there, it’s available for someone to break into your house and steal it,” said Mark Kraft, a retired ATF special agent. “As that market shrinks, the use of that product in illicit transactions or criminal activity has gone down with it.”
There are other types of ghost guns, including less common 3D-printed guns or those made with machines like the “Ghost Gunner” — a desktop tool designed to take unfinished slabs of metal and turn them into gun parts at home. “I think the law has clearly impacted a couple of the ghost gun categories, but not all of them,” Kraft said.
Still, since ghost guns assembled from nearly complete kits make up the vast majority, the rule has an outsize effect. Ghost guns surely played a role in the pandemic surge in gun violence, and now they may be playing a role in the overall post-pandemic decline.
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In California, for example, ghost guns accounted for nearly all of the increase in crime gun recoveries in 2020 and 2021, and the corresponding decline in crime guns since 2022 has also largely been because of declines in ghost guns. Recoveries of normal, serialized firearms have remained relatively stable since 2019 in the state. Meanwhile, the last two years have seen historic declines in murder and firearm homicide nationwide.
“If you are decreasing the availability of unserialized and unregulated firearms, we can reasonably assume that that’s going to have a net positive impact on public safety overall,” Heyne, the Brady officer, said, “simply by thinking about who are the kinds of individuals that are looking for unserialized and unregulated firearms to begin with.”
A lawsuit challenging the ATF’s regulations is now before the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in October and will issue its ruling in the coming months. A group of 20 major cities that have experienced a surge in ghost guns urged the justices to uphold the rule change and credited it with stemming a flood of the weapons. Their “friend of the court” filing provided more evidence showing a decline in ghost guns:
- In San Francisco, law enforcement recovered 195 ghost guns in 2023, down from 224 in 2022.
- In Pittsburgh, police recovered 21 ghost guns in 2023, down from 54 in 2022.
- In Washington, D.C., police recovered 407 ghost guns in 2023, down from 500 in 2022.
- In Oakland, California, law enforcement recovered 305 ghost guns in 2023, down from 354 in 2022.
- In Boston, ghost gun recoveries declined for the first time in four years, from 104 in 2022 to 86 in 2023.
- In Los Angeles, ghost gun recoveries in 2023 decreased 28 percent from 2022.
- In Newark, New Jersey, 39 ghost guns were recovered in 2023, down from 64 in 2022.
- In Hartford, Connecticut, police recovered 37 ghost guns in 2023, down from 58 in 2022.
Legal observers expect the Supreme Court, which allowed the Biden administration’s ghost gun rule to take effect in a preliminary ruling, to uphold the regulation. But until justices issue a decision, the future of ghost gun regulations remains uncertain.
If the court strikes down the national regulations, ghost guns may regain their foothold in the black market. That’s where state laws become even more important. Currently, 15 states and the District of Columbia have passed laws to regulate ghost guns, by requiring serialization of gun parts and background checks on their sale.
