Back in October, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Garland v. VanDerStok, the case about the ATF’s ability to regulate ghost guns, it seemed like the market for the homemade, untraceable firearms was on a downswing. Police were recovering fewer ghost guns at crime scenes. The country’s largest manufacturer of the kits used to assemble the weapons had shut down. And justices appeared inclined to support the ATF rule in question, which requires sellers of “ready to build” ghost gun kits to add serial numbers to some parts and conduct background checks on prospective buyers.
Then, the following month, Donald Trump was elected president. The month after that, a 26-year-old allegedly used a 3D-printed ghost gun to fatally shoot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan street.
The December killing jolted the public. Though it didn’t necessarily indicate that ghost guns were becoming more prevalent, it did raise questions about the state of the market — and what it might look like in the second Trump era.
Law enforcement officials, small arms researchers, and ghost gun manufacturers who recently spoke to The Trace’s Champe Barton and Jennifer Mascia did not paint a rosy picture. They described the law enforcement gains against ghost guns as tenuous at best. The technology, they warned, is only getting more sophisticated, and the weapons are becoming more appealing to criminals. And while 3D-printed guns turn up at crime scenes far less frequently than ghost guns assembled with “ready to build” kits, they’re largely unaffected by the ATF rule, since they can be entirely home-built. With a pro-gun White House, that’s hardly likely to change anytime soon. As Barton and Mascia note, in a story published with Rolling Stone, it’s more likely that the Trump administration would reconsider ATF rule entirely, rendering the Supreme Court case moot — and opening the door for a resurgence in the ghost guns market and the crimes it can fuel.
From The Trace
The Ghost Gun Market’s Vanishing Act: Law enforcement gains against ghost guns were tenuous for some time. Then came the shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO.
What Happened When Trump Sent Scores of Federal Agents to Fight Crime in the Midwest in 2020?: Experts say deployments like Operation Legend often bring a rise in excessive enforcement.
How Chicago Drill Artists Hacked the Conversation about Gun Violence: In his new book, media scholar Jabari M. Evans explores how rappers use the subgenre to gain clout.
Biden’s Gun Violence Prevention Office Is Empty. Here’s How Its Work Can Continue Under Trump: Greg Jackson, a now-former leader of the office, says there’s still momentum for countering the crisis — it just might come from outside the White House.
ATF Relaxes Zero-Tolerance Policy For Lawbreaking Gun Dealers: The change ends a federal court challenge and is expected to give inspectors more discretion in penalizing gun shops for violations.
What We’re Reading
Trump’s Return to Power Puts Militias and Border Patrol in Spotlight: Members of America’s many heavily armed, civilian-led militias tend to harbor a distrust of government and law enforcement. Still, the groups have pledged their fealty to Donald Trump. [Inkstick]
Baltimore finally has local control of its police force. Now the fight for accountability can begin: “When the state controlled the BPD, decisions about policing were made by people who had little understanding of or connection to Baltimore’s realities. Now, the power is in our hands. But with this power comes responsibility — to build structures of oversight that work.” [Baltimore Beat]
Trump gave pardons to hundreds of violent January 6 rioters. Here’s what they did: The president granted clemency to virtually everyone convicted of crimes related to the 2021 riot at the Capitol, including people charged with violent and firearm-related offenses. [NPR]
How a School Shooting Became a Video Game: Games are often blamed for gun violence, but the parents of one victim believe the form can raise awareness instead. [The New Yorker]
A$AP Rocky Rejects Plea Deal, Claims Firearm Was a ‘Prop Gun’: The rapper, who has pleaded not guilty to two felony counts of assault with a semiautomatic firearm, plans to call two witnesses to testify that he was carrying a fake gun the night prosecutors claim that he assaulted a former friend. It’s a novel legal argument. [Rolling Stone]
In Memoriam
Christopher Walker II, 30, was a helper. “Every room he walked into, every person he met, he always left them better off than the way he found them,” his mother said, adding: “He always made everybody feel important.” Walker was shot and killed last week in Houston, his hometown. He had just celebrated a milestone birthday, marking three decades of life. Walker was from a musical family, and like his dad, he was a singer himself, loved ones told local TV station KHOU. He was a graduate of a prestigious local arts magnet school and Texas Southern University, where he studied aviation management, beginning to diverge from the family path. After college, he decided to work as a physical trainer and nutritionist, an outgrowth of his entrepreneurial spirit and dedication to supporting others. Loved ones remember him as kind-hearted and gentle. “Everyone that came across him really loved his smile, really saw his heart,” his uncle said. “To me, that’s how we want him to be remembered.”
Spotlight on Solutions
Community-based violence intervention programs have received an influx of funding in recent years, but whether that investment continues has always been tenuous — even more so under the new Trump administration. As The Trace’s Olga Pierce has reported, one of the main arguments critics make against these programs is that they aren’t backed by rigorous evidence. While there is evidence for their efficacy, the complicated nature of violence makes it difficult, and expensive, to pull off traditional academic study of these interventions. The keyword here, however, might be “traditional.”
In a recent piece for Undark, sociologist Andrew V. Papachristos, the director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, argues that the scientific community has become overly attached to a single research method, the randomized controlled trial, that holds “these programs to an impossible standard” and fails to accurately examine their efficacy.
He offers another way forward: Expanding what counts as valid evidence, centering the experiences of people doing the work, and measuring outcomes beyond shooting statistics — like shifts in social networks and civic participation — can ensure that studies actually capture the complexity of community-based violence intervention. “True scientific rigor lies in accurately capturing complex realities,” Papachristos writes, “not in forcing messy social phenomena into ill-fitting methodological boxes.”
Pull Quote
“You have to allow the community to solve some of its own problems. We solve them with resources. It can’t just be about the police and locking people up.”
— Dujuan Kennedy, the public health and safety director for a grassroots organization that primarily provides community violence intervention in Detroit, on President Donald Trump’s 2020 operation that sent scores of federal agents tasked with making arrests for violent crimes to nearly a dozen cities, to The Trace