Homemade Guns

Shinzo Abe, former Prime Minister of Japan, was shot and killed last week. News reports suggest that the man who killed him used a crude homemade gun. How are homemade guns regulated here? Prior post. Jonathan Holbrook wrote about “ghost guns” and other privately made guns here. His post is great, but an update seemed appropriate for a couple of reasons. First, the number of homemade guns seized by law enforcement has grown dramatically in recent years. ABC News reports here that “[t]he number of unserialized . . . firearms seized by major metro police departments has grown exponentially. In Philadelphia, local police seized 571 ghost guns in 2021 compared to 13 in 2018. In New York City, police seized 375 ghost guns in 2021 compared to 48 in 2019.” Second, the federal government has changed how it regulates certain products that can be used to assemble guns at home since Jonathan wrote his post. I’ll dig into that a little further down. Types of homemade guns. Several different types of firearms may be made outside the confines of a gun manufacturing plant. The man who killed Prime Minister Abe seems to have assembled what some people call a “zip gun,” a rudimentary firearm improvised from commercially available materials. Such guns normally are capable of only a single shot, though in this case the gun apparently had two barrels and so was able to fire two shots. More sophisticated guns may be made through other techniques, including from kits sold online. [...]