A Clarksville man who reached for a concealed, privately made handgun while resisting officers during a January traffic stop is now headed to prison for a decade. Christopher George Goodson pleaded guilty on October 23 to possession of a weapon by a violent felon and received an agreed 10-year prison sentence, with the terms specifying he will serve 45% of that time.
Goodson entered his plea in Montgomery County Circuit Court, according to WZTV. The case stemmed from a Jan. 10 traffic stop conducted by Clarksville police Officer Quartez Harrison, during which officers discovered a loaded, privately assembled 9 mm handgun — described as a ghost gun — concealed on Goodson, who had a prior felony conviction.
Resisting Arrest, Reaching for the Gun
According to the 19th Judicial District Attorney General's Office, Goodson resisted officers' efforts to take him into custody and repeatedly reached toward the concealed weapon during the encounter. Officers ultimately secured the handgun and placed Goodson under arrest, the same account states. The agreed sentence resolves the case without a trial, locking in both the 10-year term and the 45% service requirement as part of the plea deal.
A Weapon Built to Dodge Tracing
Ghost guns, sometimes assembled from kits or unfinished parts, are privately made firearms that typically lack the serial numbers used to trace commercially manufactured weapons. That makes cases like Goodson's part of a broader pattern federal data has tracked for years. The station's report cites ATF figures showing law enforcement recovered and reported 92,702 suspected ghost guns nationwide from 2017 through 2023.
The scale of that increase is stark: the number of suspected ghost guns reported annually rose from 1,629 in 2017 to 27,490 in 2023, per the same account. The federal agency itself has separately characterized the jump as an almost 1,600% increase in recoveries and traces of suspected privately made firearms over that span, according to ATF data.
Other Ghost Gun Cases Nationwide
Felons caught with untraceable firearms have drawn varying federal sentences elsewhere in the country, though the circumstances differ from Goodson's state case. In Washington, D.C., a previously convicted felon identified as Dayvon Darius Marson was reportedly sentenced to 24 months in federal prison for possessing a loaded, unbranded P90 ghost gun and attempting to flee from police, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia.
In Baltimore, a convicted felon named Sequan Branch-Green was sentenced to 90 months in federal prison for possessing a loaded ghost gun and ammunition, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Maryland reported. Those federal outcomes are not directly comparable to Goodson's Tennessee state sentence, but they illustrate how prosecutors around the country are increasingly confronting felons armed with untraceable weapons.
