Today, in a rare show of unanimity, the Giffords group, Everytown and Brady all got together to announce they would be going into federal court in Texas to stop a threat both to public safety and national security because  kid named Cody Wilson, who owns a company called Defense Distributed, can put plans online which show how to build a plastic gun. Not surprisingly, Senator Chuck Schumer is getting ready to introduce a bill that will prevent Cody and others from posting plastic gun designs online, something which Schumer claims would create an ‘enormous’ danger and needs to be stopped.

The problem with all this heated rhetoric, and the fundraising exhortations which accompany it, is that what one gun-control activists referred to in an email as an ‘immediate’ crisis is neither immediate nor a crisis at all.  If you think that people can’t get their hands on extremely lethal guns fresh out of the factory which don’t have serial numbers, can’t be traced and cost a fraction of what it costs to make a plastic gun, then the truth is, you don’t know anything about guns.  And this lack of gun knowledge happens to be consistent within the ranks of the gun-control gang, make no mistake.

I can walk into Walmart this afternoon, plunk down $90 bucks, and walk out with a Gamo P-25 pellet gun without showing any kind of identification at all. I don’t need to be of a certain age, I don’t need to pass a background check, and I don’t have to worry about whether I have the machinery, parts or skills to assemble a gun.  I just have to buy some pellets and I’m good to go.  Oh, in case you’re wondering, the ammunition is also legal to purchase and own in most places, even if I’m 12 years old.

Are these guns lethal?  You have to know how to aim them at a lethal spot, like someone’s head. But they can cause plenty of damage and there are pellet rifles which fire ammunition at the same speed or faster than the ammo which comes out of a 22-caliber gun.  By the way, these guns are picked up by the cops at various crime scenes, certainly much more frequently than anything that might be considered a plastic gun.

There’s a website out there which is peddling the latest twist in self-made guns, known as ‘ghost’ guns, which refers to any gun which is built at home, doesn’t have a serial number and therefore can’t be traced.  These are the guns that, according to Schumer and the gun-control merry band, are the real threats to public safety and national security, because God knows what happens if something like this gets into the ‘wrong’ hands.

The website that has got everyone in the gun-control world hot and bothered is a site called Ghost Guns, which says it sells ‘unserialized’ and ‘unregistered’ guns, and claims to ‘help you build the very best mission ready and combat-tested weapon,’ which is just so much crap.  Combat-tested my rear you know what. And any time you see the phrase ‘mission ready’ you’re in make-believe, gung-ho land.

Here’s a picture of one of the guns being sold on their site:

              Note the red circle that I have drawn.  That’s where you have to drill space in the frame to fit the trigger assembly which you then have to attach to the hammer, wind the spring around the sear, and make sure the whole thing works. They don’t tell you that you need to know how to use a tool which can accurately cut steel, which is the reason that what you are buying isn’t a real gun.

My friends in the gun-control community would be doing us all a big favor if they stopped getting hysterical about ‘ghost’ guns and try to figure out what to do about the 300 million real guns that are floating around. But why miss an opportunity to make a big deal out of nothing, right?