“GHOST GUN” RESTRICTIONS ARE A SICK JOKE: While the Biden Administration frets over the supposed problem of “ghost guns” (This heavy-breathing ABA report on how DIY guns are so dangerous is shockingly light on violence actually committed with such guns), for many years gun owners have known that the feds treat the actual felony crime of lying on the background check form as a total joke. To be clear, dealers won’t run the check at all if you check one of the boxes that would make you ineligible, such as “have you been convicted of a felony?” Yet here are the stats from a GAO report on how this was treated in 2017:
Federal “NICS” Instant Background Check Transactions: 8,606,286
Denials: 112,090 (These are not necessarily always correct, and one can appeal, but most of these are because the person is legally ineligible and lied on the form.)
ATF Field Division Investigations: 12,710 (This happens when the local ATF is so concerned about you trying to buy a gun that they actually investigate it.)
United States Attorney’s Offices Prosecutions: 12.
That’s not a typo. In the entire United States of America in all of 2017, the feds prosecuted 12 people TOTAL out of probably more than 100,000 people who illegally tried to buy a gun, committing a felony crime while doing so for which the government already has all of the evidence necessary to convict — with 12,710 of those alarming enough that local ATF agents spent even more time on them.
Here’s a thought: if the government is so concerned about the “epidemic of gun violence,” how about it prosecute 100% of the people who signed a form evidencing their felonious attempt to get a gun (it’s not even a trap; the form itself warns you about this more than once) and see what happens? Instead, we are left to ponder what kind of sick people running our “justice” system see this kind of low-hanging fruit that could easily be used to clean up our streets and say, “eh, who cares?”