A majority of the Supreme Court appeared sympathetic on Tuesday to the Biden administration’s restrictions on kits that allow people to make untraceable homemade guns.
The case centered on whether the federal agency responsible for regulating firearms had acted lawfully in enacting a rule to address a surge in “ghost guns,” weapons made from kits available for purchase online and heralded as easy enough to assemble in less than an hour.
Solicitor General Elizabeth B. Prelogar told the justices that the agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, had responded to “an explosion in crimes” connected to ghost guns.
“The reason you want a ghost gun is specifically because it’s unserialized and can’t be traced,” Ms. Prelogar said.
Among the limits the agency imposed on the kits: requiring gun makers and sellers to be licensed to sell the kits, ensuring the products are marked with serial numbers so they can be traced and having would-be buyers pass a background check.
In recent years, the conservative wing of the court has proved skeptical of allowing federal administrative agencies too much leeway without specific authorization from Congress. Last term, it overturned a Trump era ban on bump stocks, firearm attachments that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire at nearly the rate of a machine gun.
But at least five of the justices on Tuesday seemed to favor the limits imposed by the Biden administration, with at least two conservatives, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, showing skepticism toward by the plaintiffs, gun manufacturers and owners who argued they should be able to purchase ghost gun kits.
When Peter A. Patterson, the lawyer for the gun groups, argued that gun enthusiasts might enjoy building firearms from the kits, Chief Justice Roberts, who had until then been largely silent, questioned whether the kits were really aimed at hobbyists. He drew an analogy to people who love tinkering with cars.
“Drilling a hole or two,” Chief Justice Roberts said, “doesn’t give the same sort of reward as working on your car on the weekends.”
Mr. Patterson responded by pointing to a reporter in California who ordered a gun kit to assemble. That reporter enlisted friends to help, Mr. Patterson said. (The news article Mr. Patterson appeared to refer to described the process of buying and building a ghost gun “shockingly easy.”)
The chief justice appeared skeptical of Mr. Patterson’s response.
“I don’t know the skills of a particular reporter,” Chief Justice Roberts replied, to laughter.
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.
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.
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