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WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a federal ban on the sale of parts kits that allow gun owners who are not allowed to make firearms in their homes that police cannot track.
In a 7-2 decision, judges agree to these homemade weapons, often referred to as “ghost guns,” and are considered firearms under federal law.
“Today, thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country rely on [federal] “A tracing system for linking firearms involved in a crime to owners,” said court Judge Neil M. Gorsuch.
Clarence Thomas of Justice and Samuel A. Alito opposed.
The decision supports regulations issued by the Biden administration in 2022. This was strongly supported by police and prosecutors.
The ruling overturns a conservative Texas judge who said Congress did not give federal regulators the power to ban “part kits” that could be assembled into weapons.
This is a rare victory for gun control advocates at the High Court.
“This Supreme Court decision is great news for everyone except criminals who have adopted untraceable ghost guns as weapons of choice,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for gun safety. “Ghost guns look like regular guns, they shoot like regular guns, kill them like regular guns, so it’s logical that the Supreme Court has confirmed that they can regulate them like regular guns.”
Last year, the conservative court majority blocked restrictions supported by both Trump and Biden administrations that banned “bump stock,” allowing semi-automatic weapons to fire as quickly as machine guns. On a 6-3 vote, the judge said the devices did not meet the definition of machine guns set by Congress.
However, the court said Wednesday that gun control in the 1968 law broadly defined firearms as “which could be designed or easily converted to expel projectiles by the actions of any weapon… explosives.”
Neither lawsuit directly related to the second amendment and gun rights protection.
The Los Angeles Police Department and other police agencies have warned of the growing threat of guns that are easy to assemble, which can be purchased online as kits.
Three years ago, LAPD said that these ghost guns were popular not only in Los Angeles but nationwide.
The Justice Department under Biden told the court that local law enforcement seized more than 19,000 ghost guns at crime scenes in 2021, increasing more than 10 times over four years.
In urging the court to support the ban, General Elizabeth Pleger argued that it could “effectively invalidate” the gun laws, dating back to 1968, which allowed police to track weapons used in crime.
Without the alcohol department, cigarettes, firearms, explosives or new regulations adopted by the ATF, “anyone can buy a kit online and assemble a fully functional gun in minutes.
California has already banned the sale of these parts kits, but Atty. General Rob Bonta said a federal ban would be necessary to enforce the ban on sending these kits by mail.
California has tried to suppress irregular guns since at least 2016, but he said these weapons account for almost 30% of all guns recovered in the state by the ATF.
Meanwhile, the number of unsafe guns recovered by California law enforcement agencies has increased 77 times, up from 167 in 2016 to nearly 12,900 in 2022, Bonta said.
However, the conservative 5th Circuit in New Orleans was not attached to warnings issued by the police department. They broke ATF regulations and decided that the “weapon parts kit” was not a firearm.
The Supreme Court put the 5th Circuit decision on hold last year and voted to hear the government’s appeal in the case of Bondi v. Vanderstock.
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