By Jess Bravin
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court held Wednesday that federal firearms laws cover so-called ghost guns, weapons that are assembled from kits that law enforcement says are becoming the go-to choice for armed criminals.
The gun industry had challenged a Biden-era regulation treating ghost guns like other firearms, with the same licensing, background checks and serial number requirements. A federal appeals court in New Orleans had set aside the regulation, reasoning that weapons parts aren’t weapons and thus weren’t covered by the Gun Control Act of 1968.
On Wednesday, a 7-2 Supreme Court disagreed. At least some gun kits fit the definition that Congress set out, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the court, and therefore the regulation stands. The court left open the possibility that some kits might be so far from a finished gun as to fall outside the regulation.
The Gun Control Act, passed in the wake of the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., responded to a wave of violence then wracking the nation. It imposed record-keeping requirements to help police solve gun crimes, and used specific language to define what qualifies as a covered weapon, including items “that may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive” and “the frame or receiver of any such weapon.”
That expansive definition “has long been understood to reach everything from run-of-the-mill rifles to novelty umbrella guns,” Gorsuch wrote. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was within the law’s scope when in 2022 it determined that covered weapons included kits that can “readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive,” he added.
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