By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court upheld on Wednesday a federal regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns” imposed by Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration in a crackdown on firearms whose use has proliferated in crimes nationwide.
The justices, in a 7-2 ruling authored by conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, overturned a lower court’s decision that the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exceeded its authority in issuing the 2022 rule targeting parts and kits for ghost guns.
Conservative justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. Gorsuch was joined in the majority by conservative Justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh as well as the court’s three liberal members.
Ghost gun products are typically purchased online and may be quickly assembled at home, without the serial numbers ordinarily used to trace guns or background checks on purchasers required for other firearms.
Plaintiffs including parts manufacturers, various gun owners and two gun rights groups – the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation – sued to block the ATF rule in federal court in Texas.
The regulation required manufacturers of firearms kits and parts, such as partially complete frames or receivers, to mark their products with serial numbers, obtain licenses and conduct background checks on purchasers, as already required for other commercially made firearms.
The rule clarified that these kits and components are covered by the definition of “firearm” under a 1968 federal law called the Gun Control Act and that commercial manufacturers of such kits must become licensed.
Ghost guns are particularly attractive to people prohibited by law from buying firearms, including minors and individuals convicted of violent crimes, according to law enforcement authorities.
During the Oct. 8 arguments in the case, most of the justices seemed inclined to view the ghost gun rule as a valid exercise of the ATF’s authority. The Supreme Court has a 6-3 conservative majority.
When these weapons are discovered at a crime scene, authorities have a hard time tracing them back to an individual purchaser because ghost guns lack the serial numbers present on other firearms. The Biden administration called the rule critical for combating a U.S. “explosion of crimes involving ghost guns.”
Former U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, defending the regulation for the Biden administration, told the justices during the arguments that the market for ghost guns is not comprised of hobbyists, as some of the challengers had suggested.
“What the evidence shows is that these guns were being purchased and used in crime. They were sold to be crime guns,” Prelogar said.
Fort Worth, Texas-based Judge Reed O’Connor invalidated the rule in 2023, ruling that the ATF had impermissibly “rewritten the law” without congressional input.
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit later upheld O’Connor’s decision, faulting the agency for attempting to “take on the mantle of Congress to ‘do something’ with respect to gun control. But it is not the province of an executive agency to write laws for our nation.”
The Supreme Court in 2023 reinstated the rule pending the Biden administration’s appeals.
The United States, with the world’s highest gun ownership rate, remains a nation deeply divided over how to address firearms violence including frequent mass shootings.
In three major rulings since 2008, the Supreme Court has widened gun rights, including a 2022 decision that declared for the first time that the U.S. Constitution protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense. In the 2022 ruling, the justices struck down New York state’s limits, enacted in 1913, on carrying concealed handguns outside the home.
In June 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a federal rule banning “bump stocks” – devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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