Few issues are as chaotic as this Supreme Court gun case.
Just last June, the court’s Republican majority legalized “bump stocks,” which effectively convert ordinary semi-automatic weapons into machine guns. The Court’s landmark Second Amendment decision in 1996 New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) requires courts to strike down any gun laws that are “inconsistent with this nation’s historic tradition of gun control,” a test so confusing that more than a dozen justices have issued judicial opinions asking the justices to explain, exactly, what. the bridge means
Still, even though this court’s view of guns is often hostile to gun laws, most of the justices seen Tuesday meeting with a gun control they’re actually willing to support.
Tuesday morning oral arguments Garland v. Vanderstock “Ghost guns” involve, ready-to-assemble kits that can easily be used to create a fully functional firearm. The kits appear to exist to circumvent two federal laws, one that requires guns to have serial numbers that can be used to track them if they are used in a crime, and another that requires gun buyers to undergo background checks first. Make that purchase.
under Federal lawThe background check and serial number requirements apply to “any weapon … that would be readily converted or designed to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” They also apply to “the frame or receiver of any such weapon,” the skeletal part of a gun that contains other components, such as the barrel or firing mechanism.
Ghost gun kits try to avoid this law by selling a kit with an incomplete frame or receiver, although it is often trivially easy to convert this incomplete part into a fully functional part. Some kits can be turned into a functional gun after the buyer drills a single hole in the frame or receiver. Others require the user to close a single plastic rail.
The most right-wing appeals court in the federal system, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, has concluded that a single missing hole is enough to exempt a gun from regulation. A frame missing a hole, that court claimed, “is neither a frame nor a receiver.” The Fifth Circuit also reasoned that ghost gun kits “cannot be easily converted into a functional gun” because the phrase “cannot be read to include any object that, if manufactured, could become functional at some undefined point in the future.” — although some ghost gun kits can be converted into firearms in minutes.
In any event, at least five members of the court — and possibly one or two more — appeared Tuesday to reject the Fifth Circuit’s argument. All three members of the court’s Democratic minority appear to be clear votes for the government, who argue that ghost guns need to be subject to the same rules as any other gun, as did Chief Justice John Roberts, who barely spoke during Tuesday’s arguments, and who has criticized ghost gun manufacturers. The lawyer spent much of his questioning mocking Peter Patterson.
Meanwhile, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, seemed particularly unsettled by Patterson’s arguments, telling him at one point that a key part of his proposed legal framework “seems a little contrived.”
If these five justices were hanging together against ghost guns, it wouldn’t be a particularly unexpected plot twist. This same case has already reached the courts in 2023 with a mix of justices’ “shadow dockets”, urgent motions and other issues that courts deal with on an expedited basis. the first time Vanderstock Reached the court, it voted 5-4 (Roberts and Barrett joined the Democrats) to temporarily establish a federal rule that ghost guns are regulated like other firearms.
Now the question is whether that temporary decision will be permanent or not. It is likely to happen after Tuesday.
Vanderstock Introduces Barrett’s definition of an “omelet”.
Tuesday’s argument began to go off the rails for ghost gun makers before Patterson even took the stage.
Early in the argument, as Solicitor General Elizabeth Preloger was making the government’s case, Justice Samuel Alito asked her a series of assumptions about incomplete material. Is a pen and an empty pad of paper a “grocery list?” Does a bunch of uncooked eggs, ham and peppers constitute an “omelet”? Alito’s argument seemed to be that, just as intact components do not constitute an “omelet,” an incomplete firearm is not a gun.
But Barrett seemed incredulous. Almost as soon as Alito finished grilling Preluger, Barrett asked about a slightly different assumption. What if someone buys an omelet kit? hello freshA service that provides ready meal kits for people to cook at home Barrett’s point was pretty clear: While a bunch of uncooked ingredients doesn’t always constitute an “omelet,” the answer is different when one buys a kit whose sole purpose is to assemble an omelet.
The same rule, Barrett suggests, should apply to ghost gun kits.
Roberts, meanwhile, was more direct than Barrett. “What’s the point of selling a receiver without drilling holes in it?” asked Chief Justice Patterson. In response, Patterson claimed, somewhat implausibly, that people might buy a ghost gun kit because they enjoy the experience of building a gun the way some hobbyists enjoy working on their own cars.
But Roberts doesn’t buy this argument at all. “Digging a hole or two,” he replied dryly to Patterson, “I don’t think you get the same kind of reward as working on your car on the weekend.”
Later in the argument, after the prologue returned to the stage, he stuck the knife into Patterson’s argument. Federal law, he noted, doesn’t ban ghost gun kits, it just requires ghost gun sellers to follow the same background checks and serial number laws as any other gun seller. So, if there is a market for law-abiding hobbyists who want to drill a few holes before firing their guns, those hobbyists can still get a ghost gun if they submit to a background check.
But what actually happened was, once the government issued a rule that ghost guns were subject to the same laws as other guns, the market for this product dried up. As it turns out, hobbyists weren’t interested in buying nearly complete guns with missing holes.
The biggest wild card in the case is Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who revealed that he voted in favor of ghost guns in 2023 because he was concerned that a gun dealer ignorant of the law could accidentally sell an unregulated kit after realizing it was illegal. Do so and then be charged with a crime.
But, as Prelogger told Kavanaugh, a gun seller can only be charged with a crime if they “willfully” sell a gun without a serial number or if they knowingly sell a gun without a background check. So Kavanaugh’s fears seem unfounded.
Will that be enough to bring Kavanagh into the government camp? unclear Ultimately, however, Kavanaugh could be the sixth vote against ghost guns if he flips. After Tuesday, it appears that the proposal to make ghost guns subject to the same laws as any other firearm is a solid five votes.
