The Supreme Court appears to have found a gun regulation it actually likes

Few things are as chaotic as this Supreme Court’s gun cases. 

Just last June, the Court’s Republican majority legalized “bump stocks,” devices that effectively convert ordinary semi-automatic weapons into machine guns. The Court’s landmark Second Amendment decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) requires courts to strike down any gun law that is not “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” a test so confusing that more than a dozen judges have published judicial opinions begging the justices to explain what, exactly, Bruen means.

Yet, while this Court’s approach to guns is frequently hostile to gun laws, a majority of the justices appeared to meet a gun regulation on Tuesday they are actually willing to uphold.

Tuesday morning’s oral argument in Garland v. VanDerStok involves “ghost guns,” ready-to-assemble kits that can easily be used to build a fully operational firearm. These kits appear to exist to evade two federal laws, one of which requires guns to have serial numbers that can be used to track them if they are used in a crime, and the other which requires gun buyers to receive a background check before they can make that purchase.

Under federal law, the background check and serial number requirements apply to “any weapon … which will or is designed to or may readily be converted 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 houses other components, such as the barrel or firing mechanism.

Ghost gun kits seek to evade this law by selling a kit with an incomplete frame or receiver, though it is often trivially easy to convert this incomplete part into a fully operational one. Some kits can be turned into a working gun after the buyer drills a single hole in the frame or receiver. Others require the user to sand off a single plastic rail.

The most right-wing appeals court in the federal system, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, concluded that a single missing hole is enough to exempt a gun from regulation. Frames missing a hole, that court claimed, are “not yet frames or receivers.” The Fifth Circuit also argued that ghost gun kits cannot “readily be converted” into a working gun because this phrase “cannot be read to include any objects that could, if manufacture is completed, become functional at some ill-defined point in the future” — even though some ghost gun kits can be converted into a firearm in a matter of minutes.

In any event, at least five members of the Court — and possibly one or two more — appeared to reject the Fifth Circuit’s reasoning on Tuesday. All three members of the Court’s Democratic minority seemed like clear votes for the government, which is arguing 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 argument, and who spent the bulk of his question time seeming to mock Peter Patterson, the lawyer for the ghost gun manufacturers.

Meanwhile, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, seemed particularly unconvinced by Patterson’s arguments, at one point telling him that a key part of his proposed legal framework “seems a little made up.”

If these five justices hang together against ghost guns, that won’t be a particularly unexpected plot twist. This same case already reached the Court in 2023 on the justices’ “shadow docket,” a mix of emergency motions and other issues that the Court deals with on an expedited basis. The first time VanDerStok reached the Court, it voted 5-4 (with Roberts and Barrett joining the Democrats) to temporarily leave in place a federal rule establishing that ghost guns are regulated like any other firearm.

Now, the question is whether that temporary decision will be made permanent. After Tuesday, it appears likely that it will.

VanDerStok turns on Barrett’s definition of an “omelet”

Tuesday’s argument started to go off the rails for the ghost gun makers before Patterson even stepped up to the podium. 

Early in the argument, while Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar was making the government’s case, Justice Samuel Alito asked her a series of hypotheticals about incomplete objects. Is a pen and a blank pad of paper a “grocery list?” Does a bunch of uncooked eggs, ham, and peppers constitute an “omelet?” Alito’s point appeared to be that, just like untouched ingredients don’t constitute an “omelet,” an incomplete firearm is not a gun.

But Barrett seemed unconvinced. Almost immediately after Alito finished grilling Prelogar, Barrett asked about a slightly different hypothetical. What if someone purchased an omelet kit from Hello Fresh, a service that delivers ready-to-cook meal kits to people’s homes. Barrett’s point was pretty clear: While a bunch of uncooked ingredients may not always constitute an “omelet,” the answer is different when someone buys a kit whose sole purpose is to be put together into an omelet.

The same rule, Barrett suggested, should apply to ghost gun kits.

Roberts, meanwhile, was more direct than Barrett. “What is the purpose of selling a receiver without the holes drilled in it?” the Chief Justice asked Patterson. In response, Patterson claimed, somewhat implausibly, that people may buy a ghost gun kit because they enjoy the experience of building a gun much like some hobbyists enjoy working on their own car.

But Roberts didn’t buy this argument at all. “Drilling a hole or two,” he dryly responded to Patterson, “I would think doesn’t give the same sort of reward that you get from working on your car on the weekend.”

Later in the argument, after Prelogar was back at the podium, she stuck the knife in Patterson’s argument. Federal law, she noted, doesn’t ban ghost gun kits, it merely requires ghost gun sellers to follow the same background check and serial number laws as any other gun seller. So, if there were a market for law-abiding hobbyists who want to drill a couple holes before they fire their gun, those hobbyists could still get a ghost gun if they submitted to a background check.

But what actually happened is, once the government issued a rule stating that ghost guns are subject to the same laws as any other gun, the market for this product dried up. Turns out, hobbyists weren’t interested in buying almost-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 seller who was ignorant of the law might accidentally sell an unregulated kit without realizing it was illegal to do so and then be charged with a crime.

But, as Prelogar 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 appear unfounded.

Will that be enough to bring Kavanaugh into the government’s camp? Unclear. But, ultimately, Kavanaugh is likely to be the sixth vote against ghost guns if he does flip. After Tuesday, it does seem like there are five solid votes for the proposition that ghost guns are subject to the same laws as any other firearm.