The flood of ghost guns is slowing after regulation. It’s also being challenged in the Supreme Court

WASHINGTON — Guy Boyd was hanging out with friends he had known for years in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the night he was accidentally shot in the head.

The high school students were too young to legally buy guns, but… federal and state laws did not apply to the gun parts kit his best friend bought online and put together himself to make a pretend gun ghost gun.

Somehow the gun went off and Boyd was shot in the eye. He felt a burning pain in his head and his vision turned red. “I remember hearing, ‘I love you, brother.’ And I said it back, but I didn’t know who said it,” Boyd said.

After that night in May 2021, he spent almost a week in the hospital. Bullet and bone fragments remain embedded in his brain, causing seizures that make his dream of attending a culinary school in New York seem hopelessly out of reach.

“I was previously in good health, played football and had no medical problems,” says Boyd, now 20. “And now it’s one thing after another.”

A Biden administration rule passed the following year now prevents teens and people who can’t pass a background check from purchasing the kits. But manufacturers and gun rights groups have fought back in court, and on Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the ordinance will stand.

“The court’s conservative majority may be somewhat skeptical of ATF’s reach here, both as a federal agency and as it relates to gun rights,” said Timothy Lytton, a professor at Georgia State University College of Law, referring to the Bureau of Alcohol. Tobacco, firearms and explosives.

According to data from the Department of Justice, the number of ghost guns nationwide has skyrocketed in recent years, from fewer than 4,000 in 2018 to nearly 20,000 recovered from crime scenes in 2021. Since the ordinance went into effect, several cities report that the number privately manufactured firearms recovered from the crime scene have been flattened or taken away.

Ghost guns are privately made firearms without serial numbers. The 2022 ordinance targeted firearms sold online in kits containing everything needed to build a functioning firearm — sometimes in less than 30 minutes, according to court documents.

The kits, long popular with hobbyists, were considered gun parts rather than firearms under federal law, so purchasing them did not require the background checks and age verification that licensed gun stores do.

That also made the products popular, authorities say, among people who couldn’t legally buy a gun, including those who were under 21 or couldn’t pass a background check. Without a serial number, ghost guns found at crime scenes are also virtually impossible to trace.

The kits can still be sold, but after new regulations and a series of local lawsuits against manufacturers, police have seen a decline in the number of ghost guns recovered in cities like New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, according to court documents.

“We’ve seen them fall off the radar quite significantly, I think, because of those regulations,” said Adam Garber, executive director of the gun prevention group CeaseFirePA, based in Philadelphia, where a mass shooting carried out with an AR-15 style ghost rifle that killed five people.

In Baltimore, a city long plagued by gun violence, recovered ghost guns fell last year for the first time since 2019, court documents show.

“The biggest problem is that people who can’t buy guns, whether they’re prohibited adults or under 21, were able to buy these guns through the mail and the internet,” said Police Commissioner Richard Worley. “The bottom line is that we want less violence. We just have to limit that as much as possible by taking illegal weapons off the streets.”

But industry and gun rights groups say the ATF has gone too far by targeting a product that has long been legal. More than two dozen Republican states supported these arguments in papers filed with the Supreme Court.

“No matter how sensible ATF’s final rule or how ‘heavy’ petitioners’ policy concerns may be, the final rule exceeds ATF’s statutory authority. And that should be the end of the matter,” the states said in the letter written by the West Virginia Attorney General’s office.

There are many ways people can get guns, and the best way to address violence is to enforce the laws already on the books, said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel at the National Shooting Sports Foundation , a trade association. “No one wants a product to be used to harm someone else, whether it’s a gun, a bat or a car. But those are criminal law issues. Congress should take action,” he said.

The Supreme Court, by a 5-4 votepreviously intervened to keep the scheme in place during the legal battle. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the court’s three liberals to form a majority, but four conservative justices are said to have kept the settlement on hold while the case played out.

The justices expanded gun rights in 2022 with a landmark opinion finding that the country’s historical traditions, rather than modern public safety concerns, determine which gun laws can remain on the books.

However, the ghost gun case is not directly about the Second Amendment. Instead, it is about the powers of federal agencies. That’s an area where conservative justices have often been deeply skeptical. overturning a 40 year old decision That made it easier for federal agencies of all stripes to regulate everything from the environment to consumer protection.

The Supreme Court has also toppled a Trump administration ban on bump stocksa weapon accessory that allows semi-automatic weapons to fire at a rate comparable to machine guns, and was used in the nation’s deadliest modern mass shooting in Las Vegas.

The court ruled that while the bump stocks allow for rapid fire, the agency incorrectly classified them as illegal machine guns because they require more input from the shooter to function.

Challengers to the ghost gun rule argue that the Biden administration has similarly overstepped its bounds with its new regulations.

“The expected outcome of ATF’s rule was not simply to regulate this industry, but to destroy it,” wrote attorneys representing Jennifer VanDerStok, a Texas high school teacher who owns firearm parts that she plans to use to make guns , as well as kit manufacturers and weapons manufacturers. rights groups.

They compare the kits to pine derby car kits popular with Boy Scouts that come with wheels, nails and a block of wood that can be cut and sanded into a toy car.

The government, on the other hand, says in court documents that the kits look more like Ikea bookshelves: The store couldn’t avoid a household goods tax simply by claiming it sells “furniture parts kits.”