Next Tuesday, one day after the justices convene for a new Supreme Court term, they will hear a case that could open up a massive loophole in gun laws. The plaintiffs in Garland v. VanDerStok ask the court to neutralize a federal law requiring gun buyers to submit to a background check, as well as a separate law requiring guns to have a serial number to allow law enforcement to track firearms. The case involves “ghost guns,” weapons that are sold dismantled and in ready-to-assemble kits. Three Trump appointees on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit concluded that guns sold in these kits are exempt from the laws requiring background checks and serial numbers, thus making it easy for people with violent felony convictions to obtain guns simply by buying them in a disassembled state, Vox reports. By 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. Thus, if someone purchases a series of firearm parts intending to build a gun at home, they still must face a background check when they purchase the gun’s frame or receiver.
Ghost gun makers seek to evade these requirements by selling a kit with an incomplete frame or receiver — although, according to the Justice Department, it’s often trivially easy to convert the kit’s incomplete part into a fully functional frame or receiver. Some kits can be turned into a working firearm after the buyer drills a single hole in the kit’s frame. Others require the user to sand off a small plastic rail. The Fifth Circuit backed these attempts to evade the law. It claimed that frames missing a single hole are “not yet frames or receivers.” The three Trump judges also argued that ghost gun kits may not “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 if only a negligible amount of work is required to make the gun function. The question now is whether a majority of this Supreme Court, which often takes an expansive view of gun rights, will sign onto this attempt to neutralize the background check and serial number laws. The court has signaled that it will not do so. The justices considered the case in an expedited process in August 2023, and voted to leave the background check and serial number requirements in full effect while the case made its way through the lower courts. The vote was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the court’s three Democrats. If one justice flips, the VanDerStok plaintiffs could prevail.