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In a unanimous vote, the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors authorized the county attorney to file an Amicus Curiae brief, or friend-of-the-court brief, for a Supreme Court case involving the regulation of “ghost guns.”
Ghost guns, which are homemade firearms that are unregistered and untraceable, pose a challenge to law enforcement officers around the state.
“Ghost guns are unregistered firearms without serial numbers that are readily assembled from gun-building kits. These kits are made up of different components that can easily be put together and purchased online by high-risk individuals, without a background check,” said Maryjo Nunez, a law clerk for San Mateo County.
“If it is a true ghost gun, then tracing is extraordinarily difficult,” said San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe in an email to this news organization. “That is the (reason) the culprits have the ghost gun rather than a traceable firearm.”
The brief, which is being prepared by the law firm Perkins Coie on behalf of various municipal governments and prosecutors, emphasizes the “grave public safety risk that ghost guns pose, and the unique public safety challenges they pose to … law enforcement agencies and prosecutors who are charged with enforcing gun crimes,” according to a presentation that Deputy County Attorney Lauren Carroll gave to the Board of Supervisors.
The Supreme Court case for which the county is filing the amicus brief is called Garland v. VanDerStok. This case began when the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives expanded the agency’s definition of a firearm to include major component parts of firearms.
This expanded definition means that the component parts of a gun are required to be licensed and include serial numbers. Manufacturers and sellers of these parts are also required to run background checks on purchasers, as they would when selling traditional firearms. This rule does not ban people from buying any type of firearm-making kit, or creating guns at home.
The requirement was overturned in two lower courts, and the federal government appealed the case to the Supreme Court, which will hear it during its 2024-25 term.
Throughout the Bay Area, law enforcement agencies are grappling with these unregistered guns. 2022 data from the San Mateo County District Attorney’s office shows that 30-40% of all guns seized by law enforcement at the time were ghost guns.
“Since ghost guns have started to proliferate in the past decade or so, they have just exploded,” said Carroll in her presentation to the Board of Supervisors.
Ghost guns have been used in various crimes and have been found in the hands of various high risk individuals throughout the county.
“San Mateo County recovered 130 ghost guns between 2019 and 2023,” said Carroll in an email to this news organization. “Including four subjects who had prior arrests for domestic violence, two subjects who had prior arrests for child abuse, one subject who had a prior arrest for elder abuse, one minor, six subjects who were validated members of criminal street gangs as defined under California law, and one case involving a domestic extremist group as defined by federal law.”
According to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, there have been eight ghost guns seized by county law enforcement officers this year as of June 24. This includes four ghost guns that were bought back at the Sheriff’s Office’s most recent anonymous gun buyback event in May of this year.
“I am excited to be a part of this,” said Supervisor Noeila Corzo during the board meeting. “I think addressing gun violence has to happen in a multitude of ways, this one included.”
