Two years ago, 16-year-old Angellyh Yambo was leaving her favorite bodega in the Bronx borough of New York City when she was struck and killed by a stray bullet.
That bullet came from a 9 mm pistol that lacked a serial number, which most guns have. But this wasn’t a traditional firearm. It was a “ghost gun” — an untraceable firearm that can be quickly assembled at home using a relatively cheap weapon parts kit.
Yambo’s mother, Yanely Henriquez, hopes that the U.S. Supreme Court will affirm ghost gun restrictions in a big case this term.
On Tuesday, the court hears oral argument in Garland v. VanDerStok. The case explores a key question: Should ghost guns, which too often allow criminals to secure firearms without background checks, be treated the same as any other gun?
That question follows a yearslong fight between the U.S. Department of Justice, which has sought to combat the rise of ghost guns, and gun sellers, who have resisted these efforts. This struggle could have major implications for Black and brown Americans, who already bear the brunt of gun violence. Black Americans, for instance, experience 12 times more gun homicides than white Americans. As a result, failing to regulate easily accessible ghost guns would disproportionately endanger these communities.
“It’s definitely concerning to me. It’s concerning to me the access youth have to ghost guns, since they’re so untraceable. There’s no real information that needs to change hands,” Madiba K. Dennie, the deputy editor and a senior contributor at the legal commentary website Balls & Strikes, told Capital B.
“You can just get a prepaid debit card at a 7-Eleven and anonymously buy a ghost gun,” she added.
President Joe Biden in September signed executive orders to, among other things, launch a task force to study the ghost gun problem. He told the crowd gathered in the East Room of the White House that “if you want to talk about reducing crime and violence in America, you need to talk about guns in America.”
Community leaders have been increasingly raising the alarm about the unique threat that ghost guns pose to vulnerable groups.
“We respond quickly when it’s police violence — rightfully so. But we should be just as concerned when it comes to community gun violence, because this impacts us the most,” Bishop Cornelius Bowser, the founder and president of Shaphat Outreach, a gun violence prevention nonprofit, told CBS 8 San Diego in May at a forum focusing on the rise of ghost guns.
Garland v. VanDerStok follows the conservative-majority high court’s controversial decision this past June to strike down a federal ban on bump stocks, an accessory that allows semi-automatic weapons to fire as rapidly as machine guns. Lawmakers swiftly denounced the move, warning that it “threatens to unleash deadly consequences” on Black and brown communities.
The high court won’t decide Garland v. VanDerStok until next year. In the meantime, here’s everything you need to know about the perils of ghost guns and the measures that some states are taking to keep people safe as federal intervention is slowed down by pushback from gunmakers.
How big of a problem are ghost guns?
Over the course of a few years — from January 2016 to December 2021 — the Department of Justice received tens of thousands of reports about ghost guns that law enforcement officers recovered during various criminal investigations. In 2021 alone, agencies seized more than 19,000 ghost guns, a 10-fold increase from 2016.
According to Dennie, a combination of factors have likely contributed to this growth, including “greater internet access, with people just being able to buy what they need online now, and 3D printing, which makes it easier to create these sorts of things.”
In response, the DOJ in 2022 announced a new rule. It updated the definition of a firearm, making it such that ghost guns fall under the same category as traditional weapons and can’t be exempted from safety precautions.
“These guns have often been sold as build-your-own kits that contain all or almost all of the parts needed to quickly build an unmarked gun. And anyone could sell or buy these guns without a background check,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement at the time.
This rule, he added, “will help reduce the number of untraceable firearms flooding our communities.”
Unsurprisingly, gun sellers protested, arguing that when people buy a ghost gun, they’re buying not a firearm but rather something like a Lego set.
This response, however, “just tortures the English language,” Dennie said. “It’s being extraordinarily, overly textual in order to frustrate the purposes of the law.”
Gun sellers challenged the rule, and a lower court sided with them. The DOJ then appealed that ruling up to the Supreme Court, which will decide the case by the end of the term that began on Monday.
What does this proliferation mean for Black communities?
Black Americans are especially vulnerable to gun violence, accounting for nearly 60% of all firearm homicides, even though they make up around 14% of the national population.
The uneven spread of this harm is due largely to an ongoing history of segregation, institutional neglect, and poverty. Refusing to limit the number of firearms would result in even more harm.
Antoine Towers, a violence interventionist at Youth Alive!, a nonprofit that helps young people recover from conflict and trauma, shared similar sentiments. He stressed that the prevalence of ghost guns only makes a bad problem worse.
“We already had a problem with firearms, but it became really ridiculous,” Towers told The Guardian in 2021, before the DOJ’s rule went into effect or became the subject of a Supreme Court case. “[Ghost guns] are so easy to get right now that the only solution I see is figuring out a way to make sure people who have them aren’t using them. It’s heartbreaking.”
The kind of person who secures a ghost gun is often someone who can’t otherwise legally access a firearm. That’s because part of the point of ghost guns is that they allow people to subvert the law.
Sellers brag about how people can get all the benefits of guns without the headaches. But these “headaches,” as an amicus curiae brief in the Garland v. VanDerStok case explains, are background checks, registration, and serialization.
This loophole is especially worrying when it comes to ghost guns reaching bad actors.
“I think that it necessarily increases the danger to everyone else if folks the law is intended to prevent from getting guns are then allowed to get ghost guns,” Dennie said.
How else can people combat gun violence?
Even if the Supreme Court decides that ghost guns shouldn’t be treated the same as other guns, some political leaders are already taking the issue into their own hands.
Consider Reading, Pennsylvania, for instance. In August, the city passed an ordinance banning the use of 3D printers to manufacture ghost guns and imposing restrictions on the “transfer, use, or conversion of unfinished firearms.” Reading became the third city in the state — after York and Philadelphia — to take such a measure to rein in the spread of ghost guns.
“By approving the ban on ghost guns, you are helping save someone else’s life,” Shaykayarira Delrio-Gonzalez, who lost a child to gun violence, said at the city council meeting where the ordinance was passed. “You’re saving your constituents.”
The Pennsylvania House of Representatives, controlled by Democrats, advanced legislation in March to criminalize the “sale of firearms or firearm parts without serial numbers.” It’s unclear whether the Republican-led state Senate will take up the bill.
Fifteen states have adopted policies that regulate ghost guns, per Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control. You can check out its interactive map that breaks down specific state law requirements here.
Notably, reforming the Supreme Court could pave the way for more forceful gun control measures, according to Dennie. That’s because the court, at least in its current arch-conservative incarnation, seems to have an eye toward obstruction.
“I imagine that if the court were to strike [the DOJ’s rule] down, it’d say, ‘Well, Congress could have passed a law that tackled this issue, but they didn’t do that here. They can go ahead and make another law,’” she explained.
But, really, the court would be saying that with a wink. It’s fully aware that — because of gridlock and Republican interests that are beholden to the powerful gun lobby — passing federal legislation isn’t going to happen.
Given this political reality, the only recourse is to do what cities such as Reading are doing.
“If progress isn’t coming from the federal legislature,” Dennie added, “I think that we have to look to state and local governments to pass their own gun regulations.”