OAN’s Brooke Mallory
4:07 PM – Monday, April 22, 2024
On Monday, the Supreme Court said that it would consider the topic of “ghost guns” and the appeal filed by the Biden administration to regulate self-assembled weapon kits like any other type of firearm.
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A firearm that may be purchased online in component parts and assembled without a tracking serial number is referred to as a “ghost gun.”
A 2022 regulation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that stated the sale of weapon kits necessitates a background check and serialization of the parts for law enforcement tracking was overturned by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In April 2022, President Joe Biden made the announcement of the new regulations during a White House event held in the Rose Garden.
“They call this rule I’m about to announce, extreme,” Biden said at the White House Rose Garden event. “But let me ask you, ‘Is it extreme to protect police officers, extreme to protect our children, extreme to keep guns out of the hands of people who couldn’t even pass a background check?’”
The high court will not hear the case until the fall.
In August 2023, the Supreme Court issued a stay that reinstated the federal regulation on ghost weapons. This action postponed the Department of Justice’s appeal to the 5th Circuit and overturned a Texas federal judge’s decision to overturn the rule. The Texas judge’s decision was later mainly affirmed by the 5th Circuit.
But while the legal challenges are pending, the Supreme Court has upheld the regulations.
Since they have become simpler to order online and built in a matter of minutes, the use of ghost guns has skyrocketed in recent years.
The Federal Register states that 1,758 ghost weapons were found by law enforcement in 2016. However, 19,344 ghost weapons were found by police in 2021—nearly twice as many as in 2020.
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