The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Biden administration’s temporary measure to institute new regulations surrounding so-called ghost guns — firearms that can be fabricated from kits within one’s personal residence.
The judgment comes after a Texas federal court overturned a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) regulation passed in 2022, which expanded the agency’s definition of “firearm,” placing new expectations of licensing and background checks on ghost gun manufacturers.
“[A] weapon parts kit is not a firearm,” Judge Reed O’Connor wrote in his ruling for the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas, striking down the ATF policy update. “[T]hat which may become or may be converted to a functional receiver is not itself a receiver.”
“Even if it is true that such an interpretation creates loopholes that, as a policy matter, should be avoided, it is not the role of the judiciary to correct them. That is up to Congress.”
On Tuesday, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and Amy Coney Barrett crossed the aisle and joined the court’s liberal contingent — Kentanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — to rule in support of the White House. Meanwhile, conservative justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh sided with the lower court’s original ruling.
“Americans across the country will be safer thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision today to keep ATF’s life-saving ghost guns rule in effect while the appeals process plays out,” John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun regulation group, told NBC News.
However, Cody J. Wisniewski, a general counsel for the Firearms Policy Coalition, condemned the ruling by noting that the lower-court ruling was on solid legal ground. “We’re deeply disappointed that the Court pressed pause on our defeat of ATF’s rule effectively redefining ‘firearm’ and ‘frame or receiver’ under federal law,” the attorney told Fox News Digital. “Regardless of today’s decision, we’re still confident that we will yet again defeat ATF and its unlawful rule at the Fifth Circuit when that Court has the opportunity to review the full merits of our case.”
A similar line of reasoning was expressed by David Thompson, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs dealt a setback on Tuesday by the Supreme Court ruling. “The Gun Control Act of 1968 reflects a fundamental policy choice by Congress to regulate the commercial market for firearms while leaving the law-abiding citizens of this Country free to exercise their right to make firearms for their own use without overbearing federal regulation,” the attorney argued in court filings previously.
In mid-July, solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar wrote on behalf of the White House’s emergency application to the Supreme Court in July. “Over the last several years, police departments around the nation have confronted an explosion of crimes involving ghost guns. In 2017, law enforcement agencies submitted roughly 1600 ghost guns” to the ATF. By 2021, “that number was more than 19,000 — an increase of more than 1000% in just four years.”
“Those submissions to ATF have been largely futile because the lack of serial numbers makes ghost guns ‘nearly impossible to trace’. . . The public-safety interests in reversing the flow of ghost guns to dangerous and otherwise prohibited persons easily outweighs the minor costs that respondents will incur.”