April 7, 2025 - Epoch Times
13:19
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| In a split 7-2 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a bit of a, you can say, unusual ruling in regards to ghost guns. | |
| Specifically, this new decision from the court, it upheld a Biden-era rule regulating which guns can and cannot be built at home. | |
| However, in order to understand the significance of this decision and what it means moving forward to anyone watching this program who wants to print guns at home, we need to break down exactly what this case was about. | |
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| Now, with that out of the way, getting back to the Supreme Court ruling, let's start at the very beginning. | |
| In case you don't know what a ghost gun is, a ghost gun is a pejorative term used by gun control advocates in order to describe... | |
| Homemade guns which don't have a serial number on them and therefore cannot be tracked by the police. | |
| Now, these ghost guns can, for the most part, be 3D printed at someone's home. | |
| All they need is a 3D printer as well as the blueprint schematics, which can all be found online for free. | |
| However, notably, there are several parts of the gun that cannot be 3D printed. | |
| Here's, for instance, how the whole process is described in an article within the Trace publication. | |
| Quote, 3D printed guns vary a lot. | |
| Some models, like the 3D printed gun company Defense Distributed's Liberator, can be made almost entirely on a 3D printer. | |
| Others require many additional parts, which are often metal. | |
| For example, many 3D printed gun blueprints focus on a weapon's lower receiver, which is basically the chassis of a firearm. | |
| Under federal law, Now, in practice, visually, here's what these kits look like. | |
| It's pretty much Everything you need except for the lower receiver. | |
| And so basically you would just purchase that kit, you would print the lower receiver, and then assemble the gun at home. | |
| And because these 3D printed guns are made outside of the traditional supply chain and don't require background checks, they are effectively invisible to law enforcement agencies. | |
| Meaning, the FBI, your local sheriff's office, the city police, they all have no idea if the gun exists, who made it, and or who owns it. | |
| That's why they're called ghost guns. | |
| They're basically like ghosts popping out of nowhere. | |
| Which is, of course, on the one hand, a Second Amendment enthusiast's dream. | |
| But also, as you would imagine, the federal government is not too thrilled with that loss of control. | |
| And along that line, within the very first year of the Biden administration, you had the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the ATF, issue a new policy directive wherein they redefine certain terms within the Gun Control Act of 1968. | |
| The agency said that moving forward, they will interpret the word firearms, as it appears in the law, to also include partially manufactured frames and receivers. | |
| Essentially, what happened was that the ATF recognized that they did not have the authority to regulate ghost guns under the law, and so they redefined the words in the law in order to gain that authority. | |
| It's a pretty clever move. | |
| With these new definitions in place, the ATF began to seek to regulate these ghost guns just like they do traditional guns. | |
| With new regulations, what it meant in practice is that it required, for one, anyone who buys one of these ghost gun kits to undergo a background check, just as if they were buying a commercially available firearm. | |
| And secondly, the new regulations, they require that anyone who sells these ghost gun kits must mark their components with a serial number so that they can be tracked by the government. | |
| However... Almost immediately after this new policy guidance was issued, a lawsuit was filed against the ATF. | |
| Now initially, the case was brought forth by four plaintiffs, a woman named Jennifer Vanderstock, Tactical Machining, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, and the Firearms Policy Coalition. | |
| However, eventually the case grew and you had several other plaintiffs join the lawsuit as well, including several companies like Blackhawk Manufacturing Group, you had Polymer 80, as well as Defense Distributed. | |
| Their main legal argument was that the ATF does not have the authority to regulate these ghost gun kits. | |
| Or to be more specific, that if the government wants to regulate these kits, a new law must be passed. | |
| You cannot just redefine the terms in the existing law to get those new powers. | |
| That was their argument. | |
| On the flip side, however, the government was justifying this redefinition move on the grounds of public safety. | |
| Here's, for instance, how the former U.S. Attorney General, Mr. Merrick Garland, Here's how he described the necessity for this redefinition when he first unveiled it. | |
| And then furthermore, you had the U.S. Solicitor General make another argument in the actual court briefing comparing a ghost gun kit To an IKEA furniture kit. | |
| Here's what she wrote. | |
| Quote, Every speaker of English would recognize that a tax on sales of bookshelves applies to IKEA when it sells boxes of parts and the tools and instructions for assembling them into bookshelves. | |
| Meaning that if the government can regulate bookshelves, they should also be able to regulate build-it-yourself bookshelves. | |
| Now, interestingly, at the lower court, they did not buy that argument. | |
| In the lower court, the ATF actually lost the case. | |
| Specifically, Judge Reed O'Connor. | |
| from the District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a summary judgment against the ATF striking down their new regulation. | |
| Here's part of what Judge O'Connor wrote. | |
| The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, ATF, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice, went beyond its statutory jurisdiction in regulating partially manufactured firearm components, related firearm products, and other tools and materials. | |
| Their rule is unlawful agency action. | |
| And as such, the ATF rule was overturned. | |
| However, the ATF filed an appeal with the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the Fifth Circuit also ruled All right, just to pause here for a super quick moment, listen. | |
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| Specifically, in a 7-2 split decision, you had Justices Neil Gorsuch, John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Sonny Sotomayor, Alina Kagan, as well as Katonji Brown-Jackson all rule in favor of keeping the so-called ghost gun rule in place. | |
| Writing for the majority, you had Neil Gorsuch write the following, quote, The Gun Control Act of 1968 allows the ATF to regulate some weapon parts kits and unfinished frames or receivers, including those we have discussed. | |
| Then, after showing a photo of some gun kit components, the opinion continues. | |
| Plainly, the finished buy-build-shoot kit is an instrument of combat. | |
| No one would confuse the semi-automatic pistol pictured above with a tool or a toy. | |
| And then, regarding the ATF's rule on background checks for buyers, they wrote this. | |
| Thousands of law enforcement agencies nationwide depend on the Gun Control Act's tracing system to link firearms involved in crimes to their owners. | |
| Sales of gun kits have grown exponentially and criminals find them attractive. | |
| This has led to an explosion of crimes involving ghost guns. | |
| Law enforcement agencies reported in 2017 that they had submitted about 1,600 ghost guns to the federal government for tracing. | |
| By 2021, that number jumped to more than 19,000. | |
| Efforts to trace the ownership of these weapons, the government represents Neil Gorsuch then goes on in this opinion to write that describing these gun kit components as weapons is justifiable. | |
| Quote, A word for a thing created by humans. | |
| In everyday speech, people sometimes use artifact nouns to refer to unfinished objects, at least when their intended function is clear. | |
| An ordinary speaker might well describe the buy, build, shoot kit as a weapon, even though a half hour of work is required before anyone can fire a shot. | |
| And so with this justification, the majority of the court agreed that the ATF can interpret the language of the Gun Control Act to also apply to gun kit component parts as well. | |
| However, though, as I mentioned, this was a split decision, with Justices Clarence Thomas as well as Sam Alito each filing their own dissenting opinions, disagreeing with the majority. | |
| And as a part of the dissent that he wrote, Clarence Thomas, well, he wrote that this ruling was inserting language into a statute that was never there. | |
| Quote. In a separate 2024 case, the Supreme Court declined to rewrite statutory wording so that it could regulate semi-automatic weapons as machine guns. | |
| The government now asks us to rewrite statutory text so that it can regulate weapon parts kits. | |
| And this time, the court obliges. | |
| The statutory terms frame and receiver do not cover the unfinished frames and receivers contained in weapon parts kits, and weapon parts kits themselves do not meet the statutory definition of firearm. | |
| That should end the case. | |
| The majority instead blesses the government's overreach based on a series of errors regarding both the standard of review and the interpretation of the statute. | |
| Clarence Thomas then goes on to write that Congress could have given the ATF the authority, but they never did. | |
| Quote, The artifact noun methodology adopted by the majority is not. | |
| Meaning, in plain English, that if the government can, in this case, interpret the words to mean whatever they wish, there's no telling where it might end. | |
| Regardless of his opinion, though, Clarence Thomas was in the minority, and the majority ruled in favor of the ATF, and as such, their new regulation stands. | |
| If you'd like to go through the details of anything that we went through in today's episode, I'll throw all my research notes down into the description box below this video if you're the type of person that likes to dig into the weeds. | |
| And all I ask in return is that you smash those like and subscribe buttons if you haven't already. | |
| And also, I'd love to know your thoughts on this whole matter. | |
| Do you think that the ATF overstepped their authority by reinterpreting the words that are in the statute? | |
| After all, the law does say firearm, and the people who passed that law knew what they meant when they wrote it. | |
| But on the flip side... | |
| Do you think that that IKEA argument is valid? | |
| I mean, after all, these ghost gun kits are kits meant to be assembled into guns, even if they're missing a few parts. | |
| Do you think that justifies the government regulating them just like guns? | |
| Or, perhaps a third option, do you think that the government should not be regulating gun ownership at all, and that doing so is a violation of the shall-not-be-infringed language of the Second Amendment? | |
| Please leave your thoughts in the comments section below. | |
| I'll be reading through them later tonight, as well as into the weekend. | |
| Until next time, I'm your host, Roman from The Epoch Times. |
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