The Supreme Court upheld the federal government’s rule regulating firearm kits known as ghost guns, requiring them to have serial numbers and purchasers to go through background checks.

The Wednesday ruling was 7-2, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissenting.

The majority of the court said Congress defined weapons broadly enough when it passed the Gun Control Act of 1968 to uphold the Biden administration’s regulation.

“If Congress had wanted to regulate only operable firearms, it could have simply addressed ’weapons’ that can ’expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.’ But Congress didn’t stop there,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote.

Justice Thomas, meanwhile, said the government wanted the court to rewrite the law to encompass weapons kits.

He said the majority of the court “blesses the government’s overreach.”

Justice Alito also said the majority went too far, but he acknowledged in his dissent that some weapons kits are closer to being fully assembled firearms than other kits, and that should have been given weight.

The dispute involved the federal government’s regulation issued in 2022 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that said gun kits that include all the parts, or receivers that include the main body of a weapon that just needs to have the final holes drilled and material scraped away, and are close enough to manufactured guns that they fall under the 1968 Gun Control Act.

But Second Amendment advocates and the gun kit industry argued that the ATF stretched the law beyond what Congress intended.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled against the feds, but the high court ruling reverses that decision and upholds the ATF rule.

• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.

• Alex Swoyer can be reached at aswoyer@washingtontimes.com.