The Biden administration’s hopes to regulate “ghost guns” were revived by the U.S. Supreme Court, at least temporarily.
A 5-4 Supreme Court ruling on Tuesday allows regulations on the weapons to go into effect.
“Ghost guns” come from kits that can be bought online and assembled into homemade firearms.
President Joe Biden has asked the court to step in, citing an alleged rise in violence involving “untraceable firearms.”
In the Biden administration’s appeal, Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote that regulation was needed to respond to “the urgent public safety and law enforcement crisis posed by the exponential rise of untraceable firearms.”
The court allowed the regulation while a challenge moves forward. The justices’ order gave no reasons for the decision.
Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in the majority.
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh dissented.
The regulation in question was issued in 2022 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It extended the bureau’s interpretation of the definition of “firearm” in the Gun Control Act of 1968.
Critics, including companies that make the kits, sued to challenge the regulations, saying that the ATF was not authorized to widen the definition of the 1968 law.
The law defined firearms as weapons that “may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive” and “the frame or receiver of any such weapon.”
Judge Reed O’Connor of the Federal District Court for the Northern District of Texas struck down the regulation in July. He wrote that “a weapon parts kit is not a firearm” and “that which may become or may be converted to a functional receiver is not itself a receiver.”
He added: “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.”
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans upheld O’Connor’s ruling, sending it to the High Court.
“Every speaker of English would recognize that a tax on sales of ‘bookshelves’ applies to Ikea when it sells boxes of parts and the tools and instructions for assembling them into bookshelves,” Prelogar wrote.
A challenger’s brief said Prelogar’s reasoning was flawed.
“A better analogy would be to a ‘taco kit’ sold as a bundle by a grocery store that includes taco shells, seasoning packets, salsa and other toppings, along with a slab of raw beef,” the brief said. “No one would call the taco kit a taco. In addition to ‘assembly,’ turning it into one would require cutting or grinding and cooking the meat — and until that was done, it would be nonsensical to treat it as food and the equivalent of a taco.”
ATF received more than 45,000 reports from 2016 to 2021 of suspected “ghost guns” recovered by law enforcement officials, according to a DOJ statement.