Oh no. The gun is older than you thought. From Miguel Gonzalez: A World War I Ghost Gun has been discovered!
The gun the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk used is described as "Grandpa's gun" in several of his messages. It is a Mauser bolt action rifle that was designed sometime before the First World War, in the days before serial numbers were required. That has the media and the Left, but I repeat myself, in hysterics. Why? Because it cannot be traced.
My question is: the gun was used by Asshole [REDACTED] whose father recognized from the photos published by the authorities and it was the rifle that belonged' to the grandfather. What more tracing/tracking do you need?
This isn't about tracing a particular firearm. This is about controlling all firearms, knowing where they are, so they can be confiscated, and the journalists, and the Left (but I repeat myself) have discovered a whole class of firearms that don't fit their preconception.
Forget caliber, forget ballistics, forget accuracy and even forget the ability of the shooter. It is the lack of serial numbers that makes a bolt action rifle super duper deadly compared to the ones that sport a number. That is the same ATF logic (or lack thereof) that tells everybody that a rifle with a 16 inch barrel is perfectly safe in the hands of civilians, but a rifle with a 15 and 7/8 inch rifle is so dangerous, the safety of the nation hangs by a thread and can murder millions of nuns and orphans with a pull of the trigger.
It's as if the media doesn't know the first thing about firearms, and can't be bothered to learn.
As one of the commenters to the post linked above pointed out... Serial numbers were not required by law until the 1960s, and so the government has no way to trace anything before then. But the rifle probably has a serial number. This was manufactured by the Germans after all. US arms from the WWI are serialized. The M1911 pistol (developed in 1911) were all serialized for the US military. That doesn't mean you can trace them. You can determine - usually - where they were made, and how much they are worth.
I note that the articles don't say "it didn't have a serial number", they say only that it predates serial number mandates. The chances of a military rifle even of the WWI era not having a serial number are pretty slim. The days of militias and/or individual militia members having to provide their own arms for combat are long over and militaries that issue rifles to their soldiers need to have some method of recordkeeping and tracking the whereabouts of the firearms.
ReplyDeleteThe fact is that it isn't a serial number that enables a weapon to be "traced", it is an uninterrupted history of that serial number's status, location and ownership. A single interruption of that history renders the "tracking" irrelevant.
I was burgled many years ago and several firearms were stolen...among them were a multiple family heirloom and collected antique firearms with no serial numbers. Also included were modern firearms of various types, all of which had serial numbers.
...which makes no difference because even if those serialized guns were used in a crime and were traced, they'd come back to me and the Police Report (and ATF report...I had a Curio and Relic FFL at the time so I had to report the loss to the ATF as well) where the trail would come to a sudden end.
The vast majority of guns used in crimes are stolen and, so, untraceable.
The potential that there are millions of guns out there that predate serial number requirements and predate any requirement to record transfers even on initial purchase from a dealer is irrelevant to that simple fact.
BTW, I did get a couple of the guns back. A few years ago, an abandoned storage unit was opened for auction and some guns were found. Standard practice is to run the numbers and a couple of them were mine. One of my AR-15's, which I really didn't care about because those were easily replaceable and had been replaced, and much more importantly my Grandfather's 1878 Colt Double Action Frontier revolver that I inherited when my dad passed. It hurt my heart to lose that gun so when I got it back I was elated.
Incidentally, the Colt revolver was manufactured WAY before any serial number requirements were enacted, but it still had a serial number on it...which is how it was traced to me. It's possible some of the other antiques I had have also turned up, but the ones without serial numbers are likely never going to find their way back home.
The Houston TV news did a special a few years back talking about the wave of ghost guns, and how they were being used in crimes and were untraceable. If you just watched and didn’t pay attention, it was about the evil black rifles. If you paid attention to what they said, untraceable firearms were linked to less than 1% of the crimes committed in Houston, and it was mostly handguns with the serial number ground off. They never mentioned how many of those ghost guns were abandoned at crime scenes, or how you could tell from spent casings that a ghost gun fired them.
ReplyDeleteWhile the news staff would love to do their part in preventing people from building their own AR platform rifles, there is no case for these weapons being used in committing crimes. They’ll blur over that, but they can’t show what doesn’t exist.