Editorial: Ready, aim, regulate: The Supreme Court makes the right call on ghost guns, for now

Ghost guns aren’t yet one of America’s biggest threats to life and limb — handguns and especially illegal handguns are a bigger menace by far — but the country would be inviting bloodshed to wait until they climb the grim charts to try to contain their pernicious spread. This is why we’ve praised state Attorney General Tish James for doggedly pursuing those who illegally ship parts to build such firearms to New York, and why President Joe Biden was wise last year to direct the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to better police the ready-to-assemble weapons.

What makes legal firearms legal is that, even as plenty of pernicious loopholes undercut the government’s best efforts, they’re generally sold to individuals who’ve passed background checks. Under federal law, people are barred from purchasing or possessing guns if, among other things, they’ve been convicted of certain crimes or are subject to court orders related to domestic violence or a serious mental condition. States enforce their own restrictions, notwithstanding the horribly wrong Supreme Court ruling last summer in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen.

Ghost guns, federal reports of which have increased 10-fold since 2016, take dead aim at that regime, promising to deliver the easy-to-assemble parts that, when quickly put together, can do just what a factory-made, legally bought firearm can do, only without a background check or a proper serial number that allows them to be traced. Biden’s ATF aimed to change that, classifying “buy build shoot” kits as guns — which they are, every bit as much as flat-packed, assemble-at-home IKEA furniture is furniture. From that, it follows that those who make the kits are gun-makers, who must be federally licensed as such, and those who buy them are gun buyers.

Of course, the arm-everyone-everywhere lobby challenged the ATF rules in court, and of course, a judge interpreting the Second Amendment as sloppily as the Supreme Court did in Bruen vacated the rules nationwide in June. Rightly arguing that Texas Federal Judge Reed O’Connor’s ruling, which asserts that “a weapons part kit is not a firearm,” risked “irreparably harming the public and the government by reopening the floodgates to the tide of untraceable ghost guns flowing into our Nation’s communities,” the U.S. solicitor general urged the high court to intervene and let the Biden rules stand for the time being.

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 order on its so-called shadow docket, agreed. The case will still be heard on the merits by a federal appeals court and perhaps ultimately by The Nine, but until then, the new rules remain.

Last year, the NYPD seized more than 430 ghost guns, 25 times more than it recovered in 2017. Earlier this year, a 16-month joint investigation yielded the takedown of a ghost gun and narcotics trafficking ring. Criminals hungry for hard-to-track weapons can try to get them from straw buyers, or shave the serial numbers off black-market guns, or go online and order components to their heart’s content. No matter which path they choose, authorities charged with protecting the public should be trying to thwart them. More unlicensed guns in the hands of more people who treat the law with contempt means more chaos, more crime and more death.

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