[Under the law, no manufacturer-stamped serial number is needed if you make a gun for personal use. ]
That doesn’t sound right.
Hyperbole overload!! Criminals can get any weapon they want for a lot less effort it takes to convert one of these blocks of aluminum into a working firearm.
So, I guess if they change the law to require serial numbers in this instance, I’ll start with “1”.
The way I understand it you can buy replacement subassemblies or individual parts to repair your gun but the lower receiver is considered to be the legal base of the gun hence the higher cost of lowers.
“It’s legal because...”
Its legal. End of story.
So how strong does an AR15 style lower receiver have to be. Couldn’t it be made of plastic or even wood, so long as the holes all line up?
Ah yes. A criminal with a machine shop smart enough to machi e a lower is too dumb to make a stole $100 gun untraceable by filing off the serial number.
Ghost Guns,
Roll yer Own.
Ghost Guns by the fast and furious gun give away ... serial numbers huh what are they good for.. absolutely nothing
Would love to know how many criminals are caught each year because the authorities had a serial number?
I’ll bet it is incredibly few.
And if a gun is stolen, and the owner reports its theft as required by law, how does that help law enforcement to catch the bad guy using it? It probably was passed from bad guy to bad guy several times as they needed cash, and how does the serial number help with that?
what am I missing here?
Sometimes I am a dunce. But not usually........
If you follow the manufacturing process back far enough, an AR15 lower starts out as simple aluminum billet, and nothing in the BATF’s charter gives them purview over simple blocks of aluminum. They have pinned the point in the manufacturing process at which (by their definition) it ceases being a mineral deposit and starts being a firearm component at 81%. So a lower finished to just 80% of completion is not yet a firearm. You can buy 80% lowers just like any other block of aluminum, no Form 4473, NICS check, or any other paperwork required.
In addition to 80% lowers (now commercially available for 1911s & Glock handguns, as well as AR15s), they’re also selling molding kits so you can cast 100% finished polymer AR lowers in the comfort of your own man-cave. All they need — at most — is trimming off the odd sprue or a little flashing from the mold imperfections. The holed and all the “working parts” already are located correctly and to the proper dimensions. And since you do the entire process, from liquid to finished product, you become the lawful manufacturer of a lawfully unserialized firearm.
There’s also a Cad-Cam milling machine being sold commercially that has everything included (software, hardware and tooling) so a completely unskilled machinist can clamp in a properly-sized aluminum billet and the mill, switch it on, and it turns your billet into a 100% finished AR lower. But it’s a one-trick pony; all it does is mill AR lowers, by CAD-CAM, completely automated and unsassisted. Again, because the maker and the end-user are one in the same, it is completely legal to take it all the way to 100% finished.
3D Printers controlled by your home PC to print whatever gun component suits your own peccadilloes (except barrels, for now) can’t be far behind.
The only drawback is that all the (unserialized & homemade guns) are (technically) non-transferrable. I guess that when you die, it’s supposed to go in the hole in the ground with you. But then again, if it’s unserialized, who’s to know that wasn’t your surviving heir who made it to begin with? ;-)
So the libs can get over it. The toothpaste is out of the tube, and there ain’t no way to put it back.
A gun is a very simple device, easy to make something that functions as a gun from common household materials. “Banning” them is ludicrous.
“Ghost guns can be purchased online from thousands of different websites without a background check.”
That’s a Federal Crime! While it’s perfectly legal to build your own firearm, you have to perform all the tasks associated with turning those parts of the firearm that are considered to be “the firearm” by the ATF into functioning pieces yourself. Furthermore, you cannot sell what you make for yourself.
What people are purchasing are “kits” that contain non-functional part (s) that you must convert yourself.
Just more journalistic stupidity on display.
Note that Achmed has learned this and has gone to making bombs. Boston is a case in point.