“Law enforcement is sounding the alarm,” Biden said of ghost guns, briefly holding one up for cameras to see in the Rose Garden. “Our communities are paying the price.”Still, the announcement on guns highlights the limits of Biden’s influence to push a sweeping congressional overhaul of the nation’s firearm laws in response to both a recent surge in violent crime and continued mass shootings.
“Ghost guns look like a gun, they shoot like a gun, and they kill like a gun, but up until now they haven’t been regulated like a gun,” said John Feinblatt, Everytown’s president.Christian Heyne, the vice president of policy at Brady, another gun control group, said Dettelbach was “an unimpeachable public servant who has spent a career using the levers of government to hold negligent or nefarious actors accountable.
Federally licensed firearms dealers must retain key records until they shut down their business or licensed activity and then transfer the records to ATF as they are currently required to do at the end of licensed activity. Previously, these dealers were permitted to destroy most records after 20 years, making it harder for law enforcement to trace firearms found at crime scenes.
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who was attending Monday’s event at the White House, applauded the move and pointed to a serious uptick in ghost guns being found by police. Police in Philadelphia have seen nearly a 500% increase in the number of ghost guns recovered in the past two years, Shapiro said. And just last week, a police officer there was shot by a ghost gun-wielding 18-year-old, who police said had also shot three others.
“There are two challenges: One, criminals can easily buy them without going through a background check. And two, they are unserialized and untraceable.”