The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday in favor of United States President Joe Biden's administration in bringing back regulations addressing the use of "ghost guns" in the country.
Ghost guns are firearm kits that people can purchase online and assemble into untraceable homemade weapons. In defending the Supreme Court's ruling, administration officials said that such firearms had recently soared in popularity, especially among criminals prohibited from buying regular guns.
Ghost Gun Regulation
The brief order of the high court did not include any reasons related to the decision to bring back the regulation, which is common when the justices act on emergency applications. The order was also provisional, which leaves the regulation in effect while a challenge moves forward in the courts.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett also ruled in favor of the regulation, joining three liberal members of the court, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, forming a majority for the final ruling, as per the New York Times.
On the other hand, Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, and Brett M. Kavanaugh noted dissents. Like the other judges, they did not give details on their decision in the ruling.
The Biden administration's regulation on ghost guns was issued in 2022 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) and worked to broaden the bureau's interpretation of the definition of the word "firearm" in the country's Gun Control Act of 1968.
In the Biden administration's emergency application, Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar said the change was needed to respond to the "urgent public safety and law enforcement crisis posed by the exponential rise of untraceable firearms."
While the measure does not ban the sale or possession of ghost guns or stop a person from buying them, it does require compliance with federal laws that impose conditions on the commercial sale of such weapons, according to CNN.
Addressing Rising Gun Violence
These restrictions include requirements that commercial manufacturers and sellers of ghost guns must mark their products with serial numbers and keep records to allow law enforcement to trace them when they are used in crimes.
United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas Judge Reed O'Connor held that the ATF had gone beyond its authority in promulgating the rule and blocked it across the nation in late June. However, a federal appeals court declined to put two key challenged provisions of the regulation on hold.
But the Biden administration has repeatedly argued that the regulation is needed to address gun violence in the nation. The measure also requires manufacturers to perform background checks on anyone who wants to buy the parts, which is typically done for whole commercial firearms purchases.
The Justice Department had also argued for the need for the regulation after it told the court that local law enforcement agencies had seized more than 19,000 ghost guns at crime scenes in 2021, which represented a tenfold increase in just five years, said Fox News.
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