On Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States said it would allow the Biden administration to continue regulating “ghost guns,” which are gun kits that can be bought online and assembled at home. These kinds of guns are untraceable.
Reportedly, the Supreme Court’s order did not give reasons and there were no noted dissents (via The New York Times):
After the Supreme Court’s initial ruling, issued Aug. 8, a federal judge in Texas and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit allowed two manufacturers to continue to sell the banned kits. The courts reasoned that the justices had left open the possibility of tailored relief for individual businesses.
“We are unpersuaded by the government’s insistence that the district court flouted the Supreme Court’s Aug. 8 order,” a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit wrote this month in an unsigned opinion refusing to pause a trial judge’s ruling in favor of the manufacturers.
In an emergency application asking the Supreme Court to intervene, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar wrote, in unusually sharp language, that the lower courts had indeed flouted the justices’ authority and “effectively countermanded this court’s authoritative determination.” She added that “the court should not tolerate that affront.”
She went on: “The lower courts openly relied on arguments that this court had necessarily rejected.”
The lower-court rulings, if allowed to stand, would have sweeping consequences, Ms. Prelogar wrote. Under them, she wrote, “anyone seeking to buy a gun without a background check — including felons, minors and other prohibited persons — can readily procure and complete an untraceable firearm from respondents’ websites.”
In August, Townhall covered how the Supreme Court initially said it would allow enforcement of Biden’s rules regarding “ghost guns.”
“The Supreme Court's action will keep in place important efforts to combat the surge of unserialized, privately-made 'ghost guns' which have proliferated in crime scenes across the country," Olivia Dalton, White House principal deputy press secretary, said in a statement after the order in August came out.
Biden’s policies surrounding restrictions on "ghost guns" were announced in April 2022 (via The White House):
Last year alone, there were approximately 20,000 suspected ghost guns reported to ATF as having been recovered by law enforcement in criminal investigations – a ten-fold increase from 2016. Because ghost guns lack the serial numbers marked on other firearms, law enforcement has an exceedingly difficult time tracing a ghost gun found at a crime scene back to an individual purchaser.
This final rule bans the business of manufacturing the most accessible ghost guns, such as unserialized “buy build shoot” kits that individuals can buy online or at a store without a background check and can readily assemble into a working firearm in as little as 30 minutes with equipment they have at home. This rule clarifies that these kits qualify as “firearms” under the Gun Control Act, and that commercial manufacturers of such kits must therefore become licensed and include serial numbers on the kits’ frame or receiver, and commercial sellers of these kits must become federally licensed and run background checks prior to a sale – just like they have to do with other commercially-made firearms.
The final rule will also help turn some ghost guns already in circulation into serialized firearms. Through this rule, the Justice Department is requiring federally licensed dealers and gunsmiths taking any unserialized firearm into inventory to serialize that weapon. For example, if an individual builds a firearm at home and then sells it to a pawn broker or another federally licensed dealer, that dealer must put a serial number on the weapon before selling it to a customer. This requirement will apply regardless of how the firearm was made, meaning it includes ghost guns made from individual parts, kits, or by 3D-printers.
In remarks from the White House last year, President Joe Biden said: “If you commit a crime with a ghost gun, expect federal prosecution.”