U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- Michigan law requires police and sheriff departments to turn confiscated firearms over to the state police. The state publishes a list of firearms each month that have not been claimed.
From the michigan.gov website:
The information below identifies firearm(s) confiscated by a Michigan law enforcement agency and turned over to the Michigan State Police (MSP) pursuant to MCL 28.434 and MCL 750.239.
List of Weapons to be Destroyed:
List of weapons to be destroyed October 2022 (public notice date 9-1-2022)(embeded below).
If you are claiming ownership of any firearm(s) listed, please write or call within thirty (30) days of the date of public notice. In addition to your ownership claim, you must be authorized to possess firearms.
If no valid ownership claim is received by MSP within thirty (30) days of the date of public notice, the firearm(s) listed above will be destroyed.
Firearm(s) listed above are not for sale.
The firearms are listed for 30 days so owners can identify them and apply to have them returned.
If no one claims the firearms, they are destroyed. Michigan law does not require they be destroyed. The destruction of firearms has become a wasteful tradition.
Michigan police destroy about half a million dollars worth of firearms yearly for political purposes.
The monthly lists contain the serial numbers (or lack of serial numbers) of the confiscated firearms. Therefore, the lists provide a way to determine how many firearms are confiscated without serial numbers. Many firearms without serial numbers are unlikely to be returned to owners, as it would be difficult to prove ownership.
In the list of firearms to be destroyed in October, there are 555 total firearms. Of those, there are 33 without serial numbers or 6 percent. of the 33 without serial numbers, 26 were manufactured without serial numbers before serial numbers were required by federal law. Six had their serial numbers removed. One was a homemade firearm, sometimes called a “ghost gun”. It was a PF94OC.
Of the 555 firearms confiscated by police in Michigan, one was a “ghost gun,” and 32 others did not have serial numbers. None of the samples with serial numbers (94%) had been traced to a legitimate owner.
This shows how ineffective the gun trace system is and how silly it is to claim “ghost guns” are a problem.
There were 26 times as many guns that had been legally manufactured without serial numbers as there were “ghost guns.” There were six times as many guns whose serial numbers had been removed as there were “ghost guns.”
There were 554 times as many guns for whom tracing was irrelevant than the single “ghost gun.”
There are hundreds of millions of guns that were made so long ago. Tracing ownership makes no sense because the guns have changed hands numerous times, and the original owner is long dead.
The only way “ghost guns” are a problem is if you believe “more guns, more problems.” That is a delusion, primarily of those who do not own guns and know little about them.
Kentucky requires its state police to sell confiscated guns through the legal dealer network, the same as new guns. Their gun sales bring in about $850,000 per year, which Kentucky police spend mostly on new equipment to offset spending of tax dollars.
The publication of the Michigan list shows us that “ghost guns” are not a problem and that gun tracing is not cost-effective.
Michigan is deliberately wasting half a million dollars a year, because of inertia and political delusion.
Michigan Gun Destruction List for October 2022
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
Traceability isn’t the objective,the agenda is.
The “agenda” being total disarmament.
The “agenda” being total civilian disarmament. There FIFY
What’s even more hilarious is that every single pistol on this list is supposed to be registered to the searchable database that Michigan maintains through the sheriff offices and the MSP. It’s almost like that doesn’t work or something? Crazy! Frivolous laws put into place on feel-good legislation don’t work? Who would have thought! Lol
well, all you have to do is look at who is running the state and you will see the reasoning behind this decision to destroy these firearms instead of selling them to save the taxpayers money.
“If you seek a beautiful peninsula, look around you” says the motto (translated from the Latin) of my old home State. I’d love to move back but the left wing politicians have turned it into such a high-tax anti-gun shit-hole that I very rarely visit.
‘Feel Good’ public policy is expensive public policy. Feel Good public policy is delivered without the essential ingredient called Public Policy Analysis. That is why it is always expensive public policy. The progressives and especially New Left Progressives are famous for delivering public policy sans analysis. That is why our country is in such a fix. This is one such example. Valuable collectibles are destroyed every year in the name of ‘gun safety.’ Stupid is as stupid does.
A guy who lived in Montana for 30 years moved back to the UP of Michigan . Gretchen made him register his handguns. He regrets ever moving back to the communist state of Michigan .
NOT picking on that person by any means but he should certainly have known what he would be getting into by moving back. There certainly might have been compelling reasons for the move though.
I would say that a good majority of these guns will end up in the hands of the police officers’ private collections.
When i was thinking about getting a FFL, I had a meeting with several agents at a gun show and was introduced to them. I asked a few qyestions and brought up about how often they worked to find out about groud off serial numbers and how it was done? They went into some tech ways and the expence of finding those numbers. I asked them if they ever thought about Magna-Flux, we used to do that in a Machine Shop to find cracks in blocks, cranks, heads before doing extensive machine work for race motors. When a number was… Read more »
I’ve known about this method, and one other of similar usefulness, for forty years or more. The second one is to etch with acid, can’t remember just shich kind works best, but should be easy to find again. As described above, when a number or symbol is stamped into metal, it shoves about a HUGE number of molecules, which then are aligned differently than pre-stamp. Using the acid the molecular alignment of the molecules is now visible, and under magnification and I think certain sort of light (UV?) the stamping becomes easily readible. These high falutin gummit poohbahs are having… Read more »
I’ve always wondered whether “ghost” guns were owned by ghosts, made by ghosts, or were intended to hunt ghosts a la deer rifle.
According to your article you used the term one ghost gun. That wasn’t even a term two years ago or thereabouts.
Don’t contribute and be part of the problem say what it is, a privately made gun!
Thanks for bringing the article and actions of the MSP to light. I always like it when a Phoney Narrative gets shot down by Cold Hard Facts, and the McSniffy Regime’s Ghost Gun narrative is as Phoney as it can be.
This article says “None of the samples with serial numbers (94%) had been traced to a legitimate owner.This shows how ineffective the gun trace system is…“ What is shows it that Michigan State Police made no attempt to return the guns to legitimate owners. A trace of a serialized firearm will frequently fail to find who had the firearm last — but it will almost always find a previous owner. The notion that so many guns couldn’t be traced is absurd. There are three reasonable possibilities here: 1) The guns were never “traced” at all. MSP may have simply looked… Read more »
I used the Wayback Machine to retrieve the Michigan State Police gun destruction announcements back to 2014. The stats look like date / destroyed / no serial / defaced / homemade / unknown 202210 / 555 / 16 / 8 / 7 / 1 / 1 202204 / 412 / 24 / 0 / 9 / 9 / 0 202203 / 535 / 24 / 0 / 14 / 0 / 0 202107 / 693 / 22 / 0 / 17 / 0 / 0 202101 / 304 / 15 / 0 / 5 / 0 / 0 201911 /… Read more »
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