Guns aren't particularly simple devices. There's a fair bit of complexity that goes into making a pull of the trigger resulting in the gun going off. It's a beautiful, elegant clockwork dance that boggles my mind despite the antiquity of the technology itself.
But in all of it, only one part – the receiver – is treated like a gun. A California Democrat wants to change that.
Instead of the status quo, she wants to regulate gun parts like triggers and barrels almost as if they're firearms themselves:
U.S. Rep. Jill Tokuda (D-HI) is introducing legislation that would mandate triggers, barrels, and other gun parts be tracked after being sold.
Island News reported that Tokuda’s bill, the Gun Hardware Oversight and Shipment Tracking Act (Ghost Act), is designed to track gun parts as a way of helping law enforcement find so-called “ghost guns.”
Hawaii News Now noted the legislation “will allow law enforcement to track gun parts coming into the state and who ordered them.”
Tokuda is reported as saying, “Let’s not make it easy for people to buy the parts that they need to make weapons of destruction, endangering law enforcement, killing everyday people, and innocent lives across this country. That’s what the Ghost Act is all about.”
However, the problem with her entire argument is that gun tracing doesn't work like that.
Even if you track them to whoever bought them, that doesn't tell anyone anything. I can legally build as many guns as I want without having to answer questions as to why. Part of that is that I live in the free state (for now, anyway) of Georgia, where we have no restrictions. Even if I bought a hundred barrels, there's no reason to believe anything nefarious is going on. They might sit in my house for years and never become a firearm.
And let's be real, gun tracing doesn't solve crimes.
People have looked and been thoroughly unable to find even one case where gun tracing was the key piece of evidence that resulted in a conviction. Not one.
This honestly has nothing to do with preventing crime, most of which still happens with traditionally manufactured firearms. It has everything to do with creating as much of a burden on the hobby of gun building as they can create.
When folks build their own guns, they do so without the oversight of the government, and the anti-gun Democrats hate that.
This isn't about anything at all but fear. They want people to be afraid that the government knows what they're doing, so they simply won't do it. It's control through terror, even as they try to frame it as a public safety measure.
The good news is that with this Congress, despite its failures, it's not likely to pass anything like this.
This is really just Tokuda making headlines back home, making her anti-gun constituents happy that they elected her, and nothing else. She knows this won't pass. She knows it's unlikely to pass even if Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority, in part because no one is that worked up about something along these lines. It's simply not happening.
So, I say we point and laugh at her for it.