Supreme Court Is Hearing Challenge to Biden Administration’s Limits on ‘Ghost Guns’

On the second day of the new term, the justices are wrestling with whether the federal government can regulate kits that can be assembled into untraceable homemade guns.

The Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Tuesday about whether the Biden administration overstepped in regulating so-called ghost guns, untraceable firearms assembled from kits bought online.

Administration officials have argued that the kits should be subject to the same reporting requirements as other firearms because ghost guns have soared in popularity in recent years, becoming tools for criminals who cannot pass background checks or other requirements for purchasing firearms.

Although it centers on guns, the case before the court is not about the Second Amendment, but rather about the limits of the power of administrative agencies. At issue is whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives acted outside its bounds in issuing a regulation in 2022 to expand the definition of “firearm” under the Gun Control Act of 1968.

Under the regulation, gun makers and sellers must be licensed to sell the kits, the products must be marked with serial numbers so they can be traced and would-be buyers must pass a background check.

The dispute is the latest challenge to the federal government’s limited attempts to address gun violence, particularly as legislative efforts have stalled in Congress.

In the previous term, a majority of the justices struck down a federal ban on bump stocks, devices that attach to firearms to enable semiautomatic rifles to fire at speeds rivaling those of machine guns. The Trump administration had banned the devices after a massacre at a country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017.

The Biden administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene after lower courts blocked the 2022 regulation.

The case, Garland v. VanDerStok, No. 23-852, was brought by gun owners and gun rights groups who argue that the Biden administration rule exceeded the bounds of the federal agency’s power under the legislation.

One of the gun owners, Jennifer VanDerStok, had left a job as a police officer to teach high school in Millsap, Texas, a rural town outside Fort Worth with about 400 residents. Ms. VanDerStok, who declined to comment via her lawyer, said in a court declaration that she wanted a ghost gun kit and that such a gun was necessary “to protect my students, my fellow teachers and myself should anyone attempt to threaten their lives on campus.”

Even as she acknowledged that she had left teaching, she added that she believed carrying a gun remained necessary as a protective measure. She said that she owned a so-called ghost gun kit from which she planned to build her own gun to use “for lawful purposes, such as self-defense.”

Another plaintiff, Michael G. Andren, who also declined to comment via his lawyer, is a retired aerospace administrator in Springtown, Texas, who now teaches firearm safety classes. In court documents, he said he had a gun license in Texas as well as permits for Arizona, Florida and Utah. Having built two guns, he wrote in court records, he described himself “as an amateur gunsmith” who appreciated “the process of crafting a personal use firearm.”

Ms. VanDerStok and Mr. Andren joined with gun parts manufacturers, along with Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation, two gun rights groups, to challenge the regulation, suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in Texas.

Restrictions on ghost gun kits, they said, are not authorized under the 1968 law’s definition of a firearm, which includes weapons that “may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive” and “the frame or receiver of any such weapon.” The power to impose regulations on such guns, they added, belongs to Congress, not to an administrative agency.

The administration has framed the issue as one of public safety that is no different from other measures that allow law enforcement to track and trace firearms. “Congress has long required commercial manufacturers and sellers of firearms and firearm frames and receivers to mark their products with serial numbers, maintain sale records and conduct background checks to keep guns away from minors, felons, domestic abusers and other prohibited persons,” lawyers for the administration wrote in a brief to the court.

Such measures, they added, are “essential to preventing and solving gun crimes.”

Ghost guns allow people to thwart those rules, the Biden administration contended, saying that because the kits lack serial numbers and do not require background checks, they appeal to criminals and have caused “an explosion in crimes committed with untraceable ghost guns” in communities around the nation.

Describing the rise in the use of ghost guns as a “public-safety crisis,” the administration said it had clarified its interpretation of the definition of a firearm.

Under the “plain text” of the Gun Control Act, it added, such do-it-yourself kits qualify because they “may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.”

The case has reached the justices before, on an emergency basis.

The court, by a 5-to-4 vote, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three liberals, sided with the Biden administration, reinstating the regulations temporarily as the legal challenge continued.