BALTIMORE — The Biden administration will unveil new rules that will ban the parts used to make ghost guns if those parts don’t have serial numbers on Wednesday.
In anticipation of the new rules, there was some concern that more ghost guns would flood communities as buyers tried to acquire parts before the changes took effect.
Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison, who testified in front of lawmakers about ghost guns, praised the new rules.
“Are you hopeful that this will make a difference in Baltimore’s crime trajectory,” WJZ reporter Ava-joye Burnett asked the commissioner.
“This is a good first step,” Harrison said. “I’m always hopeful that we will be able to turn this around because we have to deal with policing. We have to deal with enforcement, but we have to change and improve the lives of the offenders so that they would make different decisions.
Baltimore continues to struggle with curbing gun violence, and increasingly detectives are finding that the weapon of choice is a ghost gun. These weapons don’t have serial numbers so they are nearly impossible to trace.
“What kinds of challenges does it pose for the detectives when they find one of these weapons but they can’t figure out where to start,” Burnett asked.
“It makes it almost impossible for detectives to trace its origin and who was responsible for bringing them in legally or illegally and then giving them to other people and putting them into the hands of people who should not have them,” Harrison said.
In 2018, Baltimore Police Department officers said they recovered 9 ghost guns. In 2019, the department said 29 ghost guns had been recovered.
2020 – 126 ghost guns recovered
2021 – 352 ghost guns recovered
2022 – 310 ghost guns recovered as of May 31
“Do you believe there’s a direct correlation between these ghost guns and the proliferation of guns and an increase in crime,” Burnett asked.
“Absolutely, because we’re seeing an increase in ghost guns every year,” Harrison said. “You see this exponential increase in the amount of guns we seize. That’s an indication that the number of guns we don’t see is growing at the same rate. So there’s so many out there that we’re not getting, and we know that a number of them have been used in crimes.”
Dante Barksdale was a victim of one of those crimes. The Safe Streets founder turned his life around and worked to stop the bloodshed in Baltimore, but he ended up getting shot and killed by someone with a ghost gun.
One of Barksdale’s final posts on Instagram condemned violence.
Baltimore police say kids as young as 14 have been found with a ghost gun.
The police commissioner said department staff are working directly with ATF to identify individuals or businesses who purchase the weapons or parts to build them, then inject them into the streets of Baltimore.