Free Republic

The NYPD has seized 389 untraceable ghost guns so far this year — a 710% surge in such seizures since 2019, when a mere 48 were taken, police stats show. In 2022, a record-high 463 of these deadly firearms were recovered. “It’s distressing to see that many ghost guns recovered by police,” Mark Collins, federal policy director at gun control advocacy group Brady, told The Post.

In the hysteria about 3D printed guns, the words “unlicensed and untraceable” are thrown about promiscuously and irresponsibly. They are used to imply disaster is upon us, that some new scary threshold has been breached. They are scare tactics based on ignorance. Most of the 400 million plus firearms in the United States are unlicensed (unregistered) and untraceable.  It has been that way for decades, hundreds of years. It has not made a significant difference in the crime rate. It will not make a significant difference in the future. Separate from gun licensing, there are background checks at retail...

FRESNO (KMJ) -- Federal agents say there could be as many as half a million untraceable guns on the streets of California. They're called 'ghost guns' - firearms with no serial numbers and no means of identifying them. They're turning up at crime scenes - and investigators then have nothing to go on to find out who was involved. "People are buying these knowing there's no paper trial", says ATF Agent Graham Barlowe. "There's no way to trace it back to them - there's no accountability on their part. "When you're asking yourself why would someone spend $5000 on a...

Raising the specter of “foreign money” boosting your opponent’s campaign has become a bipartisan tactic in the past two election cycles. In 2008, conservatives alleged that Barack Obama’s presidential campaign was fueled in part by illegal cash from Iran and other hostile lands. Two years later, Obama and his allies ominously suggested that secret streams of foreign cash – this time from corporations – were boosting Republicans. Neither side was able to offer much compelling evidence to support their arguments, and both endured accusations of stoking jingoistic sentiment for partisan advantage. So now an unlikely team of foreigners with no...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/10/28/AR2008102803413.html Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign is allowing donors to use largely untraceable prepaid credit cards that could potentially be used to evade limits on how much an individual is legally allowed to give or to mask a contributor's identity, campaign officials confirmed.