The campaign to make it difficult or impossible to buy gun parts over the internet is well under way. Outlawing online gun part sales one of the planks of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr.’s gun control plan. A big part of that push is the recent flurry of the Brady bunch’s and other lawsuits against makers and sellers of “ghost gun” parts.
Ghost guns, which are cobbled together with various parts often purchased separately, have long been popular among hobbyists and firearms enthusiasts. The weapons that contain no registration numbers that could be used to trace them and require no background checks increasingly have shown up at crime scenes, gun control advocates say.
“There is an ample and thriving gun market in this country in which law abiding citizens can get guns thru proper channels. This is an industry that appears aimed at supplying people who can’t legally have guns,” Brady’s chief counsel Jonathan Lowy said Monday.
Cody Wilson, the director of Ghost Gunner Inc., one of the defendants, called the suits “low effort attempts to confuse the public and frustrate the lawful purpose of making your own firearms in California.” The other 12 defendants, most of them online retailers, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The plaintiffs include the families of Michelle McFayden, Diana Steele, Daniel Le, and Joseph McHugh, who died in the November 2017 shooting, and Francisco Cardenas, who suffered serious injuries.
Investigators say the shooter, Kevin Neal, manufactured an unregistered rifle used in the rampage with ghost gun parts despite being ordered by a judge to surrender all his weapons as part of a restraining order.
Neal, 44, killed his wife and four others before he died by suicide while being chased by deputies in Northern California’s Tehama County. Neal targeted an elementary school while randomly shooting at homes and motorists in a sprawling rural subdivision about 130 miles (209 kilometers) north of Sacramento.
— Christopher Weber in Families of shooting victims sue sellers of ‘ghost guns’