But along with charging individual defendants, Mr. Manhattan is not seeing close to the same level of saturation as San Francisco. “It’s far more effective to prevent these companies from dumping guns onto our streets by the tens of thousands than to sit back and idly hope that police can seize all of these unlawful guns one at a time.” “Traditional law enforcement approaches to gun safety are not working,” said Mr. In San Francisco, where last year nearly half of all recovered guns used in murders were ghost guns, the district attorney, Chesa Boudin, has filed lawsuits against three organizations that sell the weapons online. Prosecutors around the country have adopted a number of strategies to fight the spread of ghost guns. And we’re seeing this year, that 17-year-old gang member either stopped on the street or in a car, and he has that ghost gun now.” “A lot of times it would be the hobbyists or it would be someone who was mentally ill and couldn’t get a gun legally. “In the past, you haven't really seen gang members walking around with ghost guns,” she said. Inspector Nilan said in an interview that the guns were now in wider circulation. She expects the total seized by the end of this year to exceed last year’s number. The police also recovered 75 matched parts last year that had yet to be assembled, she said.īy August of this year, Inspector Nilan’s team had recovered about 120 of the weapons, as well as 30 matched parts that had yet to be assembled. She said that in 2020, the police recovered about 150 ghost guns, as compared with 48 the year before, and just 17 in 2018. Last year, as the pandemic coincided with a spike in gun purchases, ghost guns were found at an increasing rate in cities across the country, according to an analysis conducted by Everytown, the gun control advocacy group. The weapons stymie investigations, which rely on tracing guns to their source to find out who purchased them, when and from where, and they disrupt larger-scale analysis of gun-trafficking patterns. Ghost guns, which can be built from kits available for purchase from gun manufacturers online, have been a concern for law enforcement authorities for more than a decade. Ovalles’s lawyer, Robert Beecher, noted her plea but declined to comment further. Martinez, who according to court documents was discovered with the guns after he fired several from the roof of his building in northern Manhattan, did not respond to an email seeking comment. “Ghost guns are no longer an abstract, looming threat - they are here, and we need federal regulation to stop them.”īoth Mr. “These defendants turned their apartment into a small-scale gun factory,” Mr. Vance Jr., indicted Francisco Martinez, 38, and Maria Ovalles, 29, who are accused of assembling eight guns from components they had ordered online. Last month, the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R.