SF Chronicle | Want to actually help stop Bay Area violence? Crack down on 'ghost guns'

August 24, 2021

By Cat Brooks

I am a gun owner. As a Black woman in America, I think it is asinine not to be prepared to defend myself and my family in a country that places a target on my back.

But my belief in the right to arm myself for the purposes of self-defense is not absolute.

Last week, I stood with San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin and community leaders like Pastor Michael McBride with the Live Free Campaign and Rudy Corpaz from United Playaz as Boudin announced that his office would sue the manufacturers of three companies that make and distribute “ghost guns.”

Ghost guns are untraceable firearms that come in pieces readily assembled in just hours.

Lego guns if you will. The parts are purchased online, without a background check, and shipped anywhere in the country. They have no serial number and are increasingly the weapon of choice in incidents of intercommunal violence. According to Boudin, individuals caught in possession of ghost guns can be prosecuted for illegal possession of a firearm. Ghost gun manufacturers, however, skirt trouble by exploiting a hole in federal law that only enforces serial number requirements for “fully finished firearms, frames, and receivers.” Because they come in ready-to-assemble “kits,” ghost guns are not technically classified as firearms.

According to The Chronicle, the impact of these guns in the Bay Area cannot be overstated. San Francisco police seized 164 ghost guns in 2020.

They confiscated only six in 2015. And police have already confiscated over 150 more ghost guns so far this year alone.

Meanwhile, Oakland police told The Chronicle that ghost guns account for 22% of all firearms confiscated as of March of this year. That’s up from only 7% in 2019.

These guns aren’t just toys for collectors. S.F. police say that 44% of the guns that they’ve recovered as the murder weapons in homicides last year were ghost guns.

Ghost guns are an affront to the moral compass of any responsible gun owner. Dealing with them should be a priority to anyone who claims to seek an end to the increasing violence plaguing our streets.

That’s why it was refreshing to attend Boudin’s news conference, and hear someone in a position of power in criminal justice finally address intercommunal violence prevention, rather than the usual punative carceral state rhetoric.

Because of an inadequate response to the COVID-19 pandemic, communities of color are now being further devastated by an economic pandemic — a crisis that is pushing people into the underground economy, resulting in an uptick in homicides and other violent crime.

Rather than pushing for economic relief and social services, reactionary forces at all levels of California government are exploiting this moment to push a hardcore law-and-order agenda. Misinformation and fear-mongering are being used to attempt to convince us that over-policing and incarceration are the answers to our safety concerns. In Oakland, this push has led to an invasion by a trifecta of outside law enforcement agencies.

There is little to no evidence that these agencies will be able to bring down crime. Instead, they will almost certainly increase unnecessary and dangerous engagement between communities or color and law enforcement agencies that are not accountable to our local communities.

No matter how many times you angry-tweet it at me, the fact remains that there is no definitive correlation between more cops and less crime, or mass incarceration and safer streets.

Removing easy access to the weapons used to perpetrate violence, however, is a no-brainer prevention strategy that all of us should support.

Abolitionists — who believe that community safety is rooted in transformative justice, and who work to dismantle the prison industrial complex — are often accused of not caring about crime. Nothing could be further from the truth, particularly for abolitionists of color like myself. Many of us live in the very communities where violence is happening.

There needs to be accountability.

But instead of ineffectively shuffling Black and brown people in and out of cages, let’s identify and hold accountable the corporations and entities that profit off our suffering and death.

Let’s end the practice of increasing bank account balances while the bodies continue to pile up.

Cat Brooks is an award-winning actress, playwright, executive director of the Justice Teams Network, co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project and co-host of UpFront on KPFA.