Tulare Ghost Gun Workshop Busted, 111 Firearms Seized From Prohibited Man

A Tulare County man who was legally barred from owning firearms was instead running a home workshop churning out illegal assault weapons, and it cost him 111 guns. California Department of Justice special agents, working with local task force partners, seized rifles, handguns, shotguns, privately manufactured AR-15 style lower receivers, three silencers, and ammunition from the man's workshop.

How Agents Found the Illegal Manufacturing Operation

The California Department of Justice announced the seizure on Tuesday, saying the case began when the suspect was flagged in the state's Armed and Prohibited Persons System, or APPS, as someone barred from owning firearms. According to the California Department of Justice, that flag led agents to an active illegal manufacturing operation running out of the man's home workshop. California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is based in Oakland, announced the case on social media, writing that a Tulare man prohibited from owning firearms was found manufacturing illegal assault weapons in his workshop, and that special agents and local law enforcement partners removed the firearms and prevented further unlawful weapons manufacturing.

In his statement, Bonta said the case underscores why the Armed and Prohibited Persons System is vital for the safety of communities across the state. The operation was carried out jointly by the Department of Justice's Bureau of Firearms, the Tulare County Agencies Regional Gun Violence Enforcement Team, known as TARGET, and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's Division of Adult Parole Operations, per the department.

Second Huge Seizure in Tulare County This Month

This was not the only massive gun bust to hit Tulare County in August. Just two weeks earlier, on August 4, the TARGET Task Force executed a search warrant at a Strathmore residence involving a separate court-prohibited individual, according to the Visalia Police Department. That search turned up over 100 firearms, 55,000 rounds of ammunition, two silencers, and 15 unserialized ghost AR-15 lower receivers, and the department's account of the raid notes it began as an assault investigation before uncovering an illegal home manufacturing setup.

Together, the two raids mean Tulare County law enforcement pulled more than 200 firearms out of just two homes within a two-week span this month. TARGET itself is a multi-agency task force commanded by a Department of Justice Special Agent Supervisor and staffed by personnel from the Visalia Police Department, the Tulare County Sheriff's Office, the FBI, and the ATF, according to a job posting from the California Department of Human Resources.

Ghost Guns Have Become a Statewide Target

The unfinished AR-15 lower receivers found in the Tulare workshop point to a broader problem state officials have been tracking for years. Under California Assembly Bill 1621, enacted in June 2022, it is illegal to possess, purchase, sell, or manufacture unserialized firearms or firearm precursor parts without a valid state or federal serial number, the Department of Justice has said. The law closed loopholes that previously let people build untraceable weapons at home from unfinished parts.

Statewide, APPS recovered 1,437 illegal firearms in 2025, according to the department's most recent annual report, and cleared a record number of prohibited individuals from the system. The year before, in 2024, agents seized 1,520 firearms statewide, including 39 unserialized ghost guns and 49 unfinished receivers or frames. Measured against those totals, the 111 firearms pulled from the single Tulare workshop this month represent nearly 8% of what APPS typically recovers across the entire state in a full year.

The Armed and Prohibited Persons System itself dates back to state legislation passed in 2001 and became operational in 2006 under California Penal Code Section 30000. It was the first automated database in the country to cross-reference gun purchase records against disqualifying criminal and court records, flagging people who later become ineligible to own firearms because of felony convictions, violent misdemeanors, domestic violence restraining orders, or involuntary mental health commitments.

A System Strained by Staffing Limits

Clearing those flagged cases is not simple. A 2023 analysis by CalMatters found that APPS has historically faced a backlog of uninvestigated cases due to staffing constraints, since safety protocols require five special agents to deploy on each door-to-door enforcement sweep. State law defines a case as backlogged once it sits uninvestigated for six months, a threshold that has fueled ongoing legislative pushes to expand the Bureau of Firearms' agent headcount.

Tulare County has seen this play out before. In June 2024, a joint APPS compliance operation in the county led to four felony arrests and the seizure of 12 firearms, 34 magazines, more than 2,200 rounds of ammunition, and an illegal narcotics and hash oil manufacturing lab, the Department of Justice reported at the time. That case, like this month's pair of seizures, shows how a routine compliance check in the region can unravel into a far larger criminal investigation.