Ghost guns and fentanyl are killing America

This past June, Philadelphia became the latest major American city to sue the manufacturers of “ghost guns” – the DIY firearms easily assembled from kits and components often acquired on the Internet.

The move is in response to a surge of ghost gun-related shootings, bust and deaths citywide: Last year, 575 ghost guns were seized by Philadelphia police, up from just 95 in 2019.

So far this year, some 300 ghost guns have been taken off the streets – almost all made with pieces obtained from a pair of companies, Polymer80 and JSD Supply, both of which Philadelphia is taking to court. 

Ghost guns have exploded across the US, with over 25,000 of the weapons recovered by the Department of Justice in 2022, a more than 10-fold increase over 2016.

Cities ranging from New York to Los Angeles to Washington, DC have also taken the extraordinary steps of suing parts manufacturers to stem the ghost gun tide.

Even the Biden Administration has responded to the scourge, requesting in late July that the Supreme Court reinstate restrictions on the sale of ghost gun kits nationwide. 

What makes ghost guns so deadly is also what makes them so appealing: Essentially home-made, ghost-guns are able to evade gun control restrictions, and “without serial numbers, cannot be easily tracked from purchase to seizure or assist with the search for weapons when stolen,” explains Prof. Michelle Rippy, Director of the Forensic Science Research Center at the Dept. of Criminal Justice at Cal State East Bay in Hayward, Ca. 

Until recently, ghost-guns typically required a 3D-printer to translate their blue-prints into actual weapons.

Today, however, pre-printed components can be sourced via the Internet, aided by easy-to-follow tutorials on sites such as Reddit — all for just a couple of hundred dollars.

The results are hardly surprising: A 75% increase in ghost gun seizures in New York City since 2021, and a 136% increase in Los Angeles.

More than 100 ghost guns were also captured across the border in Canada last year, along with first-of-their kind organized manufacturing rings.  

Virtually all ghost gun crime has one thing in common, gangs – and many of those gangs are in some way connected to the fentanyl trade.

Indeed, as easy to assemble as fentanyl is to make, ghost guns are quickly becoming the weapon of choice amongst organized criminal crews dominating the fentanyl trade.

“Ghost guns are ideal for those conducting criminal enterprises,” explains Prof. Rippy. “Just as fentanyl is cheap and easy to manufacture, so too is the ease of assembling ghost guns.”

In New York, for instance, State Attorney General Letitia James announced the bust in June of a major traffic ring in the Finger Lakes region featuring nearly 50 defendants, 10 kilos each of fentanyl and cocaine, along numerous ghost guns.

A similar scenario played out in New Jersey in January, where nine men were charged with running a fentanyl and coke racket aided by ghost guns. 

Fentanyl trafficking and ghost-guns have also converged in cases everywhere from Rhode Island to Washington, DC to both Northern and Southern California.

An 18 month-long ATF ghost gun investigation in San Diego last year netted over 100 ghost guns along with more than 15 pounds of meth and fentanyl, while a May raid in Los Angeles saw police capture 23,000 fentanyl pills and nearly two dozen weapons, many ghost guns.

Oh, and let’s not forget Christopher Fox, brother of semi-celeb — and onetime Kanye West paramour — Julia Fox, who was arrested on the Upper East Side in March by the NYPD’s Ghost Gun team who also found fentanyl in the apartment. 

Easy and cheap to make, illicit fentanyl began replacing heroin as the main street opiate one-half decade ago.

It’s clear why: Heroin requires raw poppy plants, largely grown in the Middle East, which make for a vast and difficult trans-national trade process before hitting the street. Fentanyl, on the other hand, is fully synthetic and entirely (and easily) lab-made.

Once drug cartels — many operating out of Mexico — acquired the necessary know-how from China to produce fentanyl, the complexity of manufacturing heroin made it obsolete. 

A surge in cross-border fentanyl traffic has followed, with seizure numbers along the border up 400% since the start of the pandemic. At the same time, trafficking of US-made ghost guns is flowing in  the opposite direction to drug cartels down in Mexico.

Like fentanyl, ghost guns have taken a similar path in terms of potency and practicality. They don’t have to be purchased by a legal gun owner, anyone can acquire the components online and — most crucially — they’re “very, very difficult to trace,” said Prof. Alexander McCourt, Director of legal research at the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in a report last year.

How difficult? Of the 24,000 attempts made by the ATF to trace ghost guns in 2022, the agency succeeded a mere 151 times,” Prof. McCourt noted.

In other words, much like fentanyl, the “manufacturing” path to obtaining an illegal weapon has been streamlined for maximum ease and efficiency.

Tie in the fact that violent gangs are the primary dealers of fentanyl in the US — and that 48.9% of violent crime is gang-related — and you have two epidemics intersecting in death and lawlessness. 

As is the case with much of crime today in America, that lawlessness has been fueled by laxness. Just last month, for instance, a Bridgeport, CT-man out on supervised release was arrested in possession of a 9mm ghost gun.

A month prior, a convicted Westbury, CT-felon discarded a ghost gun as he fled from officers near his home.

Then there’s the case of the San Diego man arrested last May in possession of both fentanyl and a ghost gun; it was his 10th arrest since 2020. 

San Diego Supervisor Jim Desmond — who’s helped lead efforts to boost fentanyl education in city classrooms — describes the latter incident as emblematic of “California’s continued disregard [for] safety…[and] embrace of soft-on-crime policies and an open border.”

Unlike politicians such as Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, Sup. Desmond doesn’t necessarily view new legislation as the solution to ending the ghost-gun/fentanyl pipeline. “Harsher sentences for those caught with ghost guns, enforcing existing gun laws, and keeping violent criminals behind bars,” he believes are needed instead. 

Although Prof. Rippy describes the dual epidemics of fentanyl and ghost guns as “incredibly difficult to stem,” politicians nationwide are taking action.

Much like Mayor Kenny’s lawsuits against gun manufacturers, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is pressuring the federal government to pass legislation subjecting ghost gun parts and kits to the same “background checks and qualifications as fully functioning firearms,” he said last month.   

While these efforts are certainly laudable, they face serious obstacles in the form of soft-on-crime prosecutors, such as Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner. When asked last December about the city’s record-breaking 2021 homicide numbers, Krasner famously said to reporters, “we don’t have a crisis of lawlessness. We don’t have a crisis of crime. We don’t have a crisis of violence.”

The following year Krasner’s conviction rate for violent crimes dropped to just 33% while ghost gun seizures more thantripled.

Philadelphia has also become ground-zero for tranq — the devastating new street drug composed of fentanyl and the animal sedative xylazine.

Already the Tranq and ghost guns are coalescing; this past May, a Cranston, RI-man was arrested with 542 grams of xylazine, along with small plastic devices intended to modify machine guns produced, “ghost-like” on a 3D printer. 

Oakland,Ca. is another city hit hard by simultaneous waves of ghost gun and fentanyl violence. Paul Pinney, an Alameda County prosecutor for the DA’s office who retired in 2022 says the city began “seeing a great uptick in cases involving ghost guns…at the same time, there was a huge rise in fentanyl around 2019.”

How huge? A June 2021 bust in Oakland, for instance, not only netted a pair of ghost guns, but 16 pounds of fentanyl, “enough lethal overdoses to wipe out San Francisco’s population four times over,” San Francisco police Chief Bill Scott said at the time. 

Many Oakland residents are blaming current DA Pamela Price’s low prosecution numbers and preference for diversion programs for increasing crime. 

Mere months into her tenure, Price’s policies have already led to the formation of a recall committee intent on sending her packing. 

Price — whose campaign promised to tackle Oakland’s ghost gun crisis — has focused much of her anti-weapons efforts on the city’s youth, citing the rise in violent crime committed by offenders under the age of 18.

This is key, particularly with ghost gun “content” so rampant on Tik-Tok and SnapChat. 

Law-makers are taking notice. California State Senator Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley) introduced legislation in February that would “hold social media companies accountable” for promoting the sales of fentanyl and ghost guns. “Features in these platforms are designed to addict users,” said Sen. Skinner. “Those features… target our children with information…[about] how to buy dangerous narcotics, like fentanyl, and illegal firearms, including ghost guns.”

With fentanyl now responsible for 20% of all teenage deaths in California — and guns the leading cause of teenage deaths nationwide — Skinner’s proposed legislation could clearly not come fast enough.

Still, only a “multipronged and highly-resourced response can help to reduce both epidemics,” adds Prof. Rippy, which have hit America’s young people hardest.

“The difference between the crack era and the fentanyl era is that the children are now able to make their own weapons,” says Seneca Scott, founder and CEO of the non-profit Neighbors Together Oakland, which works to make the city safer and more livable. “Our children have become child soldiers driven by the new fentanyl boom, and ghost guns have made traditional gun control methods obsolete.”

Jared Klickstein’s writing can be found at jaredklickstein.substack.com; he’s currently working on the memoir “Crooked Smile,” which will be published next year.