The Biden administration will support its rules of so-called “ghost weapons” before the , Supreme Court , during oral arguments Tuesday, weeks after the same conservative-controlled judge threw out another provincial gun control law.
The case, Garland v. VanDerStok, is the first of several government attempts to use a decades-old law to curb gun violence nationwide, this time amid a tide of thousands of untraceable guns used in crimes.
The , Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives , issued the rule in 2022 to target the sale of parts kits that can be quickly assembled into functioning firearms, some as quickly as 30 minutes. The rule clarified that those kits must be sold with serial numbers and background checks the same as commercially produced firearms and that they qualify as “firearms.”
Challengers to the rule argued the rule went beyond ATF’s authority in the Gun Control Act of 1968 and convinced the , U. S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit , to toss the rule.
Those challengers — two individuals, one producer, one retailer and the , Firearms Policy Coalition , — , argue , the 1968 law does n’t give , ATF , the power to redefine a firearm to include their hobbyist kits.
” It transgresses the line that , Congress , drew in enacting the GCA between commerce in firearms, which is regulated, and private making of firearms, which is not, and it risks upending the regulation of popular semiautomatic firearms”, the challengers argued.
Officials for the Biden administration claim that a gun parts kit that can only be assembled with common tools is legally recognized as such.
The Biden administration stated in its brief that the rule” simply ensures that ghost guns are subject to the same straightforward and affordable administrative requirements that apply to commercial sales of all other firearms.”
Additionally, gun control advocates and the government have warned that the flood of untraceable weapons would grow if the Supreme Court, the , put an end to the rule. The Biden administration informed the justices that only 1 % of local police’s unregistered “ghost guns” have been identified by federal authorities.
Experts say the case could hinge on how , Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice , Amy Coney Barrett , interpret the words in the law. To allow the rule to continue in effect while the court fight is ongoing, the two conservative justices joined the three liberal justices on the court’s liberal wing.
But last term, those two justices were in a 6-3 majority that , struck down , a different gun control rule from the , ATF , that sought to use a machine gun ban in the National Firearms Act to restrict so-called “bump stocks” that can be attached to allow guns to mimic automatic fire.
Andrew Willinger, the executive director for the , Duke Center for Firearms Law, said the ghost guns case is “heading in a similar direction” to the bump stock case last term, but the two rules operate under different laws.
Willinger claimed that the provisional law that governs the ghost gun rule contains provisions that could “readily be converted” into weapons, which would be crucial.
In the bump stock case, the conservative majority of the court focused specifically on the role of a” trigger,” which the National Firearms Act used to define a machine gun.
There is undoubtedly more expansive language here than what the National Firearms Act definition of a machine gun was talking about, according to Willinger.
John Moran, a partner at , McGuireWoods, said at a , Federalist Society , event that just because Roberts and Barrett voted to allow the rule to stay in effect, that does n’t mean they’ll ultimately vote to uphold it. According to Moran, the court’s conservatives have recently been at odds with one another over how carefully they should interpret congressional statutes, which could determine whether the rule will be enforced.
This is a situation where we are most likely to see two textualist interpretations of the same text, according to Moran.
Many supporters of the law, which includes provisions intended to stop the sale of untraceable firearms, are concerned that the court will not uphold the rule, according to Kelly Sampson, director of racial justice and senior counsel at Brady, the organization that promotes gun control.
” So this case could show sort of the extreme implication of empowering the , Supreme Court, rather than the agencies and , Congress, to regulate such a really, really big problem for us”, Sampson said at a recent , Center for American Progress , event.
In 2022, the Democrat-controlled House passed legislation on a mostly party-line vote that would have restricted ghost guns as part of , a package of gun control proposals , in the aftermath of the elementary school shooting in , Uvalde, Texas.
But those ghost gun provisions were not included in the final gun violence package that , Congress , passed that year, which included few gun control measures.
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