Ghost guns: a growing proportion of guns seized by Las Vegas police
Before 2020, Las Vegas police sometimes went more than a month without seizing an unserialized handgun. But after a sharp rise, the rate of ghost gun seizures has held steady around 7% of all handgun seizures. The department has seized more than 1,100 ghost guns since 2020.
A bar chart shows the number of monthly ghost guns as a percentage of total handguns seized by Las Vegas police. It is near zero throughout 2019 and early 2020 but starts to rise in the spring and summer of 2020. By the summer of 2021, about 7% of handguns seized are ghost guns. That number stays approximately static through October 2023.
