But as they’ve grown in popularity, criminals have identified ghost guns as a way to get around California’s restrictive gun laws. Unserialized weapons, colloquially known as “ghost guns,” entered the American imagination as the creation of hobbyists and backyard tinkerers. A raid on Savangsy’s home in late January turned up thousands of dollars of cash, pounds of drugs, and 24 machine guns. Over the next three months, agents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives bought a dozen more unserialized weapons, including AR-15s modified to shoot fully automatic. Then, on the morning of October 23, 2018, he unveiled his newest product: a homemade, unserialized pistol modeled after a Glock. The 29-year-old told his customers that he could get “hella shit,” including guns that police would never trace.Ĭourt documents suggest he lived up to that promise.Īt first, Savangsy’s offerings were conventional: handguns, AK-47s, and AR-15s. For the better part of a year, Kevin Savangsy allegedly sold caches of weapons to federal agents out of parking lots and garages in Sacramento.
