WASHINGTON (AP) — Guy Boyd was 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 adolescent to buy guns legally, but federal and state laws didn’t apply to the gun parts kit his best friend bought online and assembled himself to create a so-called ghost gun.
Somehow the gun went off and a shot hit Boyd in the eye. He felt a pointed 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 lodged in his brain, causing seizures that make his dream of attending culinary school in New York seem hopelessly out of reach.
“Before playing football, I was in good health and had no health problems,” said Boyd, now 20. “And now it’s one thing after another.”
A Biden administration executive order passed the following year now bans teenagers and people who fail background checks from purchasing the kits. But manufacturers and gun rights groups fought back in court, and on Tuesday the Supreme Court will debate whether the regulation will stand.
“The court’s conservative majority may be somewhat skeptical of the 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 the Justice Department, the number of ghost guns across the country 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 have reported that the number of privately manufactured firearms recovered at crime scenes has flattened or decreased.
Ghost guns are privately manufactured firearms without a serial number. The 2022 regulation focused on those sold online in kits containing everything needed to build a functional firearm – sometimes in less than 30 minutes, according to court documents.
The kits, long popular with hobbyists, were considered gun parts, not firearms, under federal law, so purchasing a kit did not require the kind of background checks and age verifications conducted at licensed gun shops.
That made the products popular among people who couldn’t legally buy a gun, including those who were under 21 or couldn’t pass a background check, according to authorities. Without a serial number, it is also nearly impossible to track down ghost guns found at crime scenes.
The kits can still be sold, but after novel 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.
“I think we’ve seen them pretty much fall off the radar because of this rule,” said Adam Garber, executive director of the gun violence prevention group CeaseFirePA, based in Philadelphia, where a mass shooting was carried out using an AR device. A Type 15 ghost gun killed five people.
In Baltimore, a city long plagued by gun violence, ghost gun discoveries fell last year for the first time since 2019, according to court documents.
“The biggest problem is that people who can’t buy a gun, whether they’re banned adults or under 21, have been able to buy these guns through the mail and over the Internet,” said Police Commissioner Richard Worley. “The bottom line is we want less violence. We just need to limit that as much as possible by removing illegal guns from the streets.”
But industry and gun rights groups say the ATF went too far by targeting a product that has long been legal. More than two dozen Republican-leaning states supported those arguments in documents filed before the Supreme Court.
“No matter how wise the ATF’s final rule or how ‘weighty’ the applicants’ policy concerns may be, the final rule goes beyond the ATF’s statutory authority. And that should be the end of the matter,” the states said in the brief written by the West Virginia Attorney General’s Office.
There are many ways people can get guns, and the best way to combat violence is to enforce the laws already in place, said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an industry group. “Nobody wants a product to be used to harm another person, be it a gun, a bat or a car. But these are criminal justice issues. Congress would have to take action,” he said.
The Supreme Court had previously intervened by a 5-4 vote to keep the regulation in effect during the legal battle. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined with the court’s three liberals to form a majority, but four conservative justices would have put the regulation on hold while the proceedings continued.
The justices expanded gun rights in 2022 with a landmark opinion that found the country’s historical traditions, not up-to-date public safety concerns, determine which gun laws can remain in effect.
The ghost gun case, however, is not directly about the Second Amendment. Instead, it is about the powers of the federal authorities. 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 also struck down a Trump administration ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semi-automatic weapons to fire at speeds comparable to machine guns and that was used in the country’s deadliest up-to-date mass shooting in Las Vegas .
The court concluded that while the shock stocks allow for rapid fire, the agency wrongly 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 also overstepped its bounds with its novel rule.
“The expected result of ATF rule was not just to regulate this industry, but to destroy it,” wrote lawyers representing Jennifer VanDerStok, a Texas high school teacher who owns firearm parts that they make into weapons would like, as well as kit manufacturers and weapon manufacturers. Rights groups.
They compare the kits to the pine derby car kits popular with Boy Scouts, which come with wheels, nails and a block of wood that can be carved and sanded into a toy car.
The government, however, says in court documents that the kits are more like Ikea bookshelves: The store can’t avoid a tax on household goods simply by claiming it sells “kits of furniture parts.”
