The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to freeze a lower court order that bars the government from regulating so-called ghost guns – untraceable homemade weapons – as firearms under federal law. The brief order grants the Biden administration’s request to allow the regulations to remain in effect while legal challenges play out.

The vote was 5-4. Chief Justice John Roberts and fellow conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with the court’s three liberals to allow the rule to take effect. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh would have denied the application.

In 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives updated its regulations to define the kits as firearms under the law so that the government could more carefully track them.

Still, the federal definitions of “frame or receiver” have endured for decades before ATF changed them in the Final Rule. ATF’s desire to change the status quo ante does not outweigh the few additional weeks or months needed to complete judicial review of ATF’s work. Thus, under Winter or Nken or any other standard, see supra n.*, we cannot say the Government has shown that it is entitled to emergency vacatur of the district court’s injunction as to
the two party-plaintiff manufacturers.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday allowed the Biden administration to temporarily reinstate a rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives regulating “ghost guns” while a challenge to the rule continues in a federal appeals court. In June, a federal judge in Fort Worth, Texas, had barred the ATF from enforcing the rule anywhere in the United States. Urging the justices to intervene, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar had told the justices that the order by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor was “irreparably harming the public and the government by reopening the floodgates to the tide of untraceable ghost guns flowing into our Nation’s communities.”

The vote was 5-4, with Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh indicating that they would have denied the government’s request and allowed the ban on enforcement of the rule to continue. The ATF issued the rule at the center of the dispute in 2022 to make clear that federal laws governing the sale of firearms – requiring, for example, background checks for purchases and imposing recordkeeping obligations – apply to “ghost guns,” firearms without serial numbers that virtually anyone can assemble with parts that they purchase, often in a kit.

sikacz wrote: Tue Oct 17, 2023 8:55 am Totally stupid. How does this affect anyone with a self made gun? Do people have to put serial numbers on their guns? And to what point? A serial number doesn’t do any good unless there is a registry.

Unfortunately, even if a majority of the court ultimately sides with the plaintiffs it could be a long time before that decision is handed down. It looks like the folks behind Tactical Machining couldn’t afford to wait for months or years for the prospect of a positive outcome in their litigation, and I worry that other plaintiffs may find themselves in the same position before long.

CowboyT wrote: Wed Oct 18, 2023 10:10 am

sikacz wrote: Tue Oct 17, 2023 8:55 am Totally stupid. How does this affect anyone with a self made gun? Do people have to put serial numbers on their guns? And to what point? A serial number doesn’t do any good unless there is a registry.

Exactly. And registries lead to confiscations, i. e. the government officials know which houses to raid first.

sikacz wrote: Tue Apr 23, 2024 8:28 am So what’s next in this tug of war?

https://assets.nationbuilder.com/firear ... 1726165820

And a frame or receiver is still a “frame
or receiver,” 18 U.S.C. 921(a)(3)(B), even if the buyer
must remove some superfluous plastic rails or drill a
few holes to make it functional.

In Garland v. VanDerStok, the justices will consider a challenge to a rule issued by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, & Explosives that regulates “ghost guns” – firearms without serial numbers that almost anyone can assemble from parts, often purchased in a kit. Last year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld a decision by a federal district judge in Fort Worth, Texas, concluding that the law was inconsistent with federal firearms laws. The Biden administration then came to the Supreme Court, which had already agreed to allow the federal government to enforce the rule while the challenge continued, asking the justices to review the 5th Circuit’s decision. The justices agreed in April to take up the case, which is a statutory question and does not involve the Second Amendment.

A Supreme Court argument about the government’s ability to ban so-called ghost guns took some unusual turns Tuesday as the justices mused about grocery orders, western omelets and the challenges of assembling IKEA furniture. By the end of the oral arguments, it appeared that a rule the Biden administration issued two years ago cracking down on the sale of often-untraceable gun kits on the internet would likely get enough votes from the justices to survive a challenge from makers of the products. The case prompted the justices to turn to real-world examples as they wrestled with the question of how complete a firearm — or the frame or receiver of a gun — must be before they are subject to a federal law that mandates background checks for purchasers and the recording of serial numbers that can be used to trace the use of weapons in crimes. “Is it the case that components that can easily be converted into something constitute that thing before they are converted as a matter of ordinary usage?” Justice Samuel Alito asked Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who argued in favor of preserving the ghost gun rule.

“I’m going to show you: Here’s a blank pad, and here’s a pen,” Alito said, holding up a yellow notepad in one hand and a pen in the other. “Is this a grocery list?” “There are a lot of things you could use those products for to create something other than a grocery list,” Prelogar replied, prompting Alito to shift to another example to make his point that a kit of parts to build a gun isn’t necessarily a “weapon.” “If I show you, I put out on a counter some eggs, some chopped up ham, some chopped up pepper and onions, is that a western omelet?” Alito asked. Prelogar again said no, because even that collection of ingredients could be used to make something else, while the parts kits at issue in the case “have no other conceivable use” beyond making a firearm. Alito’s foray down the grocery aisle prompted Justice Amy Coney Barrett to chime in. “Would your answer change if you ordered it from Hello Fresh, and you got a kit, and it was like turkey chili, but all of the ingredients are in the kit?” Barrett asked.

“We would recognize that for what it is,” Prelogar responded. “It doesn’t stretch plain English to say I bought omelets at the store, if you bought all of the ingredients that were intended and designed to make them.” Barrett’s in-court rebuttal to Alito on Tuesday morning was notable because she was one of two conservative justices who joined with the three liberal justices last year to allow the ghost gun rule to take effect despite lower-court rulings that put it on hold on the grounds that it exceeded the authority Congress granted to federal officials in the Gun Control Act of 1968. Chief Justice John Roberts also sided with the liberals in that vote and he, too, sounded skeptical Tuesday about the notion that the federal government could regulate weapons but not kits that could be fashioned into them. A lawyer for the gun-kit makers, Peter Patterson, told Roberts that some hobbyists relish the opportunity to build their weapons rather than buy them off the shelf.

“Just like some individuals enjoy working on their car every weekend, some individuals want to construct their own firearms,” Patterson said. But Roberts noted that many of the kits at issue require only very modest efforts, like some drilling, to convert them into operable firearms. “Well, I mean, drilling a hole or two, I would think, doesn’t give the same sort of reward that you get from working on your car on the weekends,” the chief justice responded. In addition to Barrett and Roberts, the liberal justices sounded supportive of the legality of the gun-kit rule. Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who voted last year to leave the rule blocked, seemed to be struggling with his position Tuesday and possibly inclined to accept at least part of the regulation. Another conservative who voted earlier to keep the rule on ice, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, expressed concerns that it could allow criminal prosecution of hobbyists or others who genuinely believed the gun parts they had didn’t constitute a firearm subject to regulation. Alito also insisted that the lines the government was seeking to draw were unduly murky, including the question of when a parts kit could be “readily” turned into a weapon. “Some of us who do not have a lot of mechanical ability have spent hours and hours and hours trying to assemble things that we have purchased,” Alito said. “I’m with you on that one, Justice Alito, as someone who struggles with Ikea furniture,” Prelogar replied, alluding to a line in the government’s brief asserting that IKEA couldn’t avoid charging sales tax on couches or bookshelves by claiming that it was only selling kits to make them.