On Mondaay, there was a prop waiting for President Biden in the Rose Garden: a hunk of polymer that could be turned into a handgun at home with a little patience, a few tools – no more than an electric drill, a set of files, and some sandpaper – and most importantly, no serial number. It was a so-called ghost gun, the “weapon of choice,” according to the White House, “for criminals, for terrorists, for domestic abusers.” And for at least one Senate candidate, who is none of those things. Blake Masters owns a handful of ghost guns. He built them himself.
The Arizona Republican certainly doesn’t fit the administration’s description of a typical ghost gun owner: He is an upstanding member of his community and a law-abiding citizen. Nor does he share the sinister view of these weapons espoused at the White House. He views building a gun at home as an interesting hobby and a legitimate political statement, not as an urgent threat to public safety.
Ghost guns are “very legal” and “very cool,” Masters tweeted Monday along with a picture of an AR-15- style rifle that he said he made himself. “But now, thanks to Biden’s new rule change,” he added, “I would be a felon if I made another one just like it today.”
Not quite, says Matthew Larosiere. After reviewing the 364-page rule released by Biden’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an attorney with the Firearms Policy Coalition, told RealClearPolitics that Masters “might be skipping some legal nuance.”
The new ATF rule expands the existing definition of a firearm to include so-called “buy, build, shoot” kits like the one Biden palmed in the Rose Garden and said could be built “in as little as 30 minutes.” Want to assemble your own gun from a kit, like the “Polymer80” which includes all the parts and tools needed to assemble a pistol out of the box? You still can, but now a background check is required, and the materials must be marked with a serial number.
The new rule does not, however, outlaw “80% receivers.” Also known as “lowers,” they can be ordered as a raw aluminum block, then milled with a machine and considerable skill to go the remaining 20% that is necessary to complete a functioning firearm. Hobbyists can purchase those receivers, the part of a gun that houses the mechanisms necessary to fire, and then use their own tools to build a rifle without a serial number. No background check required. That is, at least for now.
Biden promised that his new ATF rule was “just the start.” His stated goal? “Outright banning the sale and possession of un-serialized guns.” Hence the current controversy over ghost guns, an issue that brings the legal traditions of the Second Amendment into focus with evolving technology as regulators complain they can’t keep pace. In light of that larger debate, according to Larosiere, Masters was voicing “a very real concern” that gun enthusiasts share, namely a fear “that an unaccountable bureau has aspirations to criminalize one of the purest exercises of the fundamental right to [bear] arms.”
For Masters, that exercise began in his Tucson garage. He started with a block of aluminum, open-source computer files from the Internet, and an expensive CNC milling machine. It concluded with a rifle, and he told RCP that by now he has “probably made four or five successfully.” At first, the build was “definitely a weekend project.” Aluminum shavings would block a sensor somewhere, or a bug in the code would buck the whole process. “Things can go wrong anytime you mix hardware with software,” he explained, admitting that along the way “I ruined a few lowers.”
“It's definitely harder than they want to say in the Rose Garden,” Masters reported. He admits, though, that after considerable practice, “I could easily do one in probably a half hour.” But where Biden sees a grave and obvious danger to the public welfare, Masters sees a check on the government – a modern process whereby digital code provides a do-it-yourself bulwark to a centuries-old right.
Masters believes that when the Founders penned the Second Amendment they were both guaranteeing the right to own guns and anticipating that citizens would build them. “In the colonial days, you were expected to know how to not just fire your weapon, but to reload it,” he said, “and probably to fix low-level things that went wrong with it too.” If gunsmithing wasn’t in your wheelhouse, then “there were people in your community that could literally make them if you didn't know how to do that yourself.”
Although neighborhood gunsmiths hardly exist these days, Masters believes that the principles of individual gun ownership still hold. What is alien, he said, is “this idea that everything needs to be centralized, regulated, dictated, and promulgated from Washington, D.C. That is a very modern idea.”
Technology has eclipsed even that contemporary sentiment, according to Masters. The Biden administration, he believes, is just trying to play catch up. “What they want to do is shut down hobbyists and enthusiasts like me, and ultimately, they want people not to have this capacity,” he said.
Joe Biden offered a very different reading of history in the Rose Garden. “I support the Second Amendment. You have a right,” he said. But those liberties are not unlimited: “From the very beginning, the Second Amendment didn’t say you can own any gun you want, big as you want.” You couldn’t buy a cannon when the Second Amendment was ratified, the president asserted, and there were certain people who couldn’t buy a gun at all. “It’s nothing new,” Biden said. “It’s just rational.”
New laws are also likely a non-starter in a sharply divided legislature, a political reality that Biden has acknowledged from the beginning of his administration. He directed Attorney General Merrick Garland to take up the issue unilaterally last year, he said Monday, “because I was having trouble getting anything passed in the Congress, but I used what we call ‘regulatory authority.’” Gun control advocates signaled their approval with applause there in the Rose Garden, and Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit that advocates for gun control, heralded the new rule as “a massive win.” But the demographics of gun politics are shifting, and the issue may not automatically be a winner for Democrats.
Uncertainty during the pandemic fueled a surge of gun purchases, and not just among the traditional and overwhelmingly white NRA crowd. According to John Roman, a researcher at the University of Chicago, “new gun owners during the pandemic were much more likely to be younger and people of color compared to pre-pandemic gun owners in America.” Of course, those numbers represent purchased firearms, not ghost guns built at home. This means Masters may find himself in exotic political territory.
If he wins Arizona’s Republican primary, he will challenge incumbent Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly, a staunch advocate for stricter firearm regulation and the husband of former Rep. Gabby Giffords, who suffered a severe brain injury as a result of an assassination attempt in 2011. Before his time in the Senate, Kelly helped co-found the Giffords PAC, which emphasized the congresswoman’s tragic experience with gun violence and focuses heavily on the issue. The argument over ghost guns will almost certainly play a role if Masters wins his party’s nomination.
Biden previewed that debate, noting that law enforcement reported to the ATF that nearly 20,000 “suspected ghost guns” had been recovered in connection to criminal investigations. “Law enforcement is sounding the alarms. Our communities are paying the price. And we’re acting,” the president said.
Masters replied to RCP that this was just “the new scary thing” and accused the White House of making a play to “appeal to people's emotions.” The effect of the new regulation, Masters added, was a paradox that “stops law-abiding people.” Moreover, the new rule was met with confusion upon its release.
Larosiere, the attorney with the Firearms Policy Coalition, summed up the general feeling among gun advocates, telling RCP that “it is clear” that the end goal of Biden’s ATF is “to raise the cost and complexity of home building, with a clear end goal of rendering it illegal.”
He noted one provision of the rule which would require federal firearm licensed dealers (FFLs) to mark any gun without a serial number that comes into their possession, even if just temporarily for repairs. “This sets up a horrible snafu for any FFL working on such a firearm, or even holding it overnight,” Larosiere said, and “the likely result here is that many FFLs will refuse to work with privately made firearms at all, thereby alienating owners for literally no reason.”
This is why Masters finds the Democrats’ ghost guns argument “totally disingenuous.” He believes it targets law-abiding citizens instead of criminals who would find it “way easier to buy a gun with a straw purchase or on the black market.” Others, like the Gun Owners of America, are already preparing a legal challenge to the rule that they call “pure gun control” and claim “will do far more than the White House is pretending.”
A land war in Europe, meanwhile, has made private gun ownership less of an academic question. Some conservatives see it as a very practical, even fundamental, issue. It’s hypocritical, they say, for an administration that is arming a foreign population to the teeth to try and restrict gun ownership at home. “They are always saying,” Masters told RCP, “‘what could you possibly need an AR-15 for – that is a weapon of war.’ But then they are cheering on the people of Ukraine who have small arms, and even some Javelin missiles that we supply them, and are using them quite effectively.”
Biden engaged the same point on the campaign trail and as president, while making the opposite point. “If you think you need weapons to take on the government,” he told an audience at the White House last April, “you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.” While most on the left played the line off as witty hyperbole, the president was mocked by many on the right for those words. Masters characterizes Biden’s statement as “remarkable” and “incoherent.”
“No, actually people being able to make their own guns and to own their own guns free of any sort of federal registry is really important,” Masters said before pointing to COVID lockdowns in other countries as a counterfactual. “It's what prevents things like Australia or the Canadian experience, martial law basically, from happening here.”
These kinds of worst-case scenario conversations are rare on Capitol Hill. Some on the left might even find them unseemly. No doubt if Masters makes it to the Senate, a few of his new colleagues will find his libertarian streak grating. But the former tech executive is blunt about a future that he says too many in Congress are ill-equipped to understand.
“Maybe they're very wise in some sense, but there are also some who are pushing 80,” he said of his octogenarian potential colleagues. “That makes it all the easier to delegate to faceless bureaucrats, who on net trend left and do things like what we taught them in Rose Garden. It won't help. It won't actually save any lives. But it will curtail millions of Americans’ rights.”
Finally, he concluded that gun control is obsolete – “I think it's dead politically. I think it's dead technologically.” Despite the efforts of the president, Masters believes that the accelerating pace of innovation has forever eclipsed regulators who seek to rein in ghost guns. “Because as the stuff gets easier, anyone's just going to be able to print a gun. And pretty soon it won't take 30 minutes, and pretty soon it won't be hard, and I regard that as a welcome development.”
