Supreme Court Justices Appear Likely To Keep Biden Limits On 'Ghost Guns'

Several conservative Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical of a challenge to a Biden administration rule requiring untraceable “ghost guns” to be regulated like regular firearms during oral arguments on Tuesday.

Plaintiffs in the case, known as Garland vs. VanDerStok, hope to overturn a 2022 regulation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives targeting ghost guns. These guns can be assembled at home from kits with minimal tooling — but under the new ATF rule, they need to meet the same background check and record-keeping requirements as guns bought from a store.

“If the Court now says that one undrilled hole is enough to prevent regulation, it is going to be a sea change,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar said, in her arguments backing the ATF rule. “Going forward, all guns could become ghost guns.”

The number of ghost guns recovered at crime scenes spiked by more than 1,000% over the five-year period from 2017 to 2021, to 19,000, prompting the new rule. Though ghost guns are identical in form and function to normal firearms, people could freely buy home-assembled ghost gun kits online — raising concerns among law enforcement that they allowed both prohibited persons and minors to skirt existing gun regulations.

The 2022 ATF rule did not ban ghost guns, though some states have more tightly restricted them. Instead, the ATF required sellers and manufacturers to follow the same serialization and background check rules first mandated by the Gun Control Act of 1968.

The rule also altered the definitions for the parts of a gun that house its firing mechanism, called the frame (for pistols) or the receiver (for long guns). The ATF regulates those parts as if they were the gun itself.

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