State watchdog calls for crackdown on ghost guns and repeat gun scofflaws

New Jersey’s famously tight gun laws helped shootings dip last year to their lowest point in 25 years, but authorities say creative criminals have found a workaround that threatens to reverse that progress — they’re making guns at home.

Resourceful lawbreakers can bypass background checks and build guns from scratch in the privacy of their homes, using 3D printers, blueprints, and kits they buy online to create weapons that can fire quicker and unload more bullets than factory-made models, investigators and police supervisors testified Tuesday at a public hearing on illegal guns.

The State Commission on Investigation convened the hearing at the Statehouse in Trenton, with an eye on issuing a report and recommendations for reforms later this year.

“A piece of plastic no bigger than a Lego block can turn a pistol into a machine gun. Can you imagine that it only takes a 3D printer, plastic filament, and a little know-how using online instructions to build a gun and gun accessories at home?” commission chairwoman Tiffany Williams Brewer said. “As a confidential source who’s assembled many of these homemade weapons told the SCI, it’s no more complicated than building IKEA furniture, only costing a few dollars, in the time it takes to watch a TV show.”

The commission began investigating the issue at the request of Assemblyman Herb Conaway Jr. (D-Burlington), a doctor who chairs the Assembly’s health committee, Brewer said. Conaway raised specific concerns about homemade guns, she added.

They’re known as ghost guns because they’re unregulated, unserialized, and untraceable. Groups like Everytown for Gun Safety regard ghost guns as the fastest-growing gun safety problem in the U.S.

Because they’re untraceable, ghost guns tend to be used in multiple crimes, becoming what police call “multi-shoot guns” or “community guns” — used multiple times in a short period of time, often in the same community, investigators and officers who testified Tuesday said.

Investigators shared maps showing shootings that ballistics tests pinned on the same multi-shoot gun. In Newark, investigators linked one gun — still unrecovered — to 10 shootings over 18 months that left four people injured, including a 9-year-old boy and two 17-year-olds. In Trenton, they tied one gun to five shootings over four months that left two people dead and nine injured. That gun was recovered.

Seizure data also shows the uptick in ghost guns, with recoveries rising 600% between 2019 and last year, state police data shows. Police in New Jersey recovered about one ghost gun a week in 2019, but that soared to almost one a day by last year, investigators said.

Police also have seen a rise in devices known as “switches” that convert guns into fully automatic weapons that can fire a barrage of bullets with a single trigger pull, investigators said. Federal law bans the possession of switches, but New Jersey law doesn’t.

Legislative change needed

New Jersey lawmakers have acted in recent years to crack down on ghost guns, making it illegal in 2018 to purchase parts or distribute 3D printing information to make ghost guns.

But investigators Tuesday said lawmakers must act to close gaps in the law.

They suggested cracking down on online purveyors of gun parts and computer codes that enable people to print firearm parts and heightening penalties for and expanding pretrial detention of gun offenders found to have possessed or used ghost guns or guns used in multiple shootings.

Recent efforts statewide to crack down on repeat gun offenders have contributed to the downward trend in shootings, investigators said.

Legislators also should criminalize the public discharge of a firearm (outside of permitted shooting like hunting and target practice) and beef up penalties for people who fire guns at certain places, much like drug offenses are weightier when committed in school zones, investigators said.

State data shows New Jersey has far less gun violence than the rest of the country, with 922 shooting victims last year — much lower than the high of 1,569 in 2012 and the lowest since such tracking began in 2009, said Joshua King, a commission investigative analyst.

But King pointed out some alarming trends in those figures. Children continue to fall victim to gun violence, with 89 children shot last year — including 11 under age 10, he said. Black people were 31 times likelier to die by gun violence in New Jersey than white people, he added.

And New Jersey should more robustly track shootings without victims, which number in the thousands, he said.

“Often shooters miss their targets,” King said.