Minnesota Moves to Ban Ghost Guns

Minnesota's attorney general and two state legislators want to make building, owning, or selling an unserialized firearm a crime.

Driving the news: Attorney General Keith Ellison, Senator Ron Latz, and Representative Dave Pinto introduced HF 3407/SF 3661, a bill that would prohibit ghost guns across the board — possession, manufacture, sale, transfer, and even distributing 3D-print design files.

By the numbers:

• 187 ghost guns traced in Minnesota from 2017–2021
• 631 traced in just 2022–2023 combined
• That's a 237% increase in a two-year window versus a four-year baseline

Between the lines: The bill isn't just about banning finished unserialized guns. It would limit how many home-built firearms a person can make per year, require serial numbers on any homemade gun, and restrict sharing digital files used to 3D print firearms. That last piece is the aggressive edge — criminalizing a file is a different legal animal than criminalizing a physical object.

"The ability to 3D print a firearm or order a gun-building kit online makes it far too easy for dangerous individuals to get their hands on a gun, and that's a serious problem." — Attorney General Keith Ellison

The legal question: Ghost gun regulations have faced mixed results in federal court. The ATF's 2022 rule treating certain kits as firearms was vacated by the Fifth Circuit and is still working through appeals. Minnesota's proposed law is a state-level criminal statute, not a regulatory rule — which is a different legal pathway, but the First Amendment angle on criminalizing design files hasn't been definitively resolved anywhere.

What Idaho owners should know: This bill is Minnesota's problem right now, not Idaho's. But the legislative template — serialization mandates, annual build limits, file distribution bans — is showing up in blue-state legislatures with increasing regularity. The 3D-print file prohibition in particular is the kind of provision that tends to migrate. Worth watching what happens to it in committee.

What's next: The bill has backing from Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O'Hara and gun control groups including Protect Minnesota and the Giffords Law Center. No vote has been scheduled. Minnesota's legislature is DFL-controlled, so it has a realistic path forward.