Bill would not criminalize disassembling and cleaning your gun
CLAIM: A bill passed by the Democrat-led U.S. House of Representatives would criminalize disassembling, cleaning and re-assembling your gun without a firearm manufacturer’s license.
AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. The bill, which is unlikely to pass the Senate, would ban ghost guns, or privately made firearms without serial numbers. The bill would not make it illegal for gun owners whose firearms have serial numbers to operate or clean their guns.
THE FACTS: In response to recent mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, the House passed a wide-ranging package of gun legislation on Wednesday. Many people responded to the provisions in the bill on social media.
One June 8 tweet with over 11,000 likes read, “U.S. House of Reps. votes 226-194 to criminalize disassembling, cleaning, and re-assembling your gun without a firearm manufacturer’s license, including 8 Republicans!”
The post appears to refer to Title III of the bill, labeled Untraceable Arms. That provision bans people from manufacturing, selling, transferring or buying ghost guns.
One section of Title III amends the U.S. Code to define “manufacturing firearms” as “assembling a functional firearm or molding, machining, or 3D printing a frame or receiver, and shall not include making or fitting special barrels, stocks, or trigger mechanisms to firearms.”
Some social media users took this to mean it would be illegal to reassemble your own serialized gun after disassembling and cleaning it. However, this misinterprets the bill’s text, several legal experts and the chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee told the AP.
Amending the definition of “manufacturing firearms” would impact people who sell unassembled guns that aren’t completed, or “ghost guns,” according to Dru Stevenson, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston. These sellers would be classified as manufacturers and would need to follow certain regulations, including adding a serial number to the main structural component of the gun, called the receiver.
“Congress is trying to, basically, classify the people that are making these unassembled guns as manufacturers so that they will have to put serial numbers on them,” Stevenson said.
Rukmani Bhatia, senior federal affairs manager at the Giffords anti-gun violence organization, agreed, saying, “There is nothing in Title III that would bar a law-abiding gun owner who has a firearm that is serialized from taking that gun apart, cleaning it, and putting it back together in their home.”
Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Violence Solutions at Johns Hopkins University, acknowledged that the wording might be “confusing or ambiguous” but said “it is difficult to imagine anyone would ever be charged under this statute for disassembling and assembling his or her firearm to clean it.”
Aaron Hiller, chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, said claims that the bill would ban people from disassembling, cleaning or reassembling their guns were “just flat out wrong.”
“That’s just not accurate,” Hiller told The Associated Press in a phone interview. “The prohibition here is on putting ghost guns into circulation. Everything else is about determining what a ghost gun is.”
Hiller said the team that drafted the bill included firearm experts and a reference check was done to ensure there were no unintended consequences of the bill text.
On Thursday, the House also voted to pass a “red flag” bill that would allow families, police and others to ask federal courts to order the removal of firearms from people at extreme risk of harming themselves or others.
While gun-control legislation is passing in the Democratic-controlled chamber, it remains unlikely to pass in the Senate. The Senate is pursuing negotiations focused on improving mental health programs, bolstering school security and enhancing background checks.
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This is part of AP’s effort to address widely shared misinformation, including work with outside companies and organizations to add factual context to misleading content that is circulating online. Learn more about fact-checking at AP.