Jennifer Mascia:
In 2022, President Biden’s DOJ implemented a rule requiring gun assembly kits to have serial numbers and buyers to undergo background checks, basically treating them like any other gun.
And these are parts kits that you can buy online and use to assemble a gun, sometimes in as little time as 20 minutes. Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority today, one of the court’s conservative justices, he said that the regulation of some weapons parts and kits is allowed under the 1968 Gun Control Act, which says a weapon qualifies for regulation if it is capable of being readily converted into a gun.
So a gun group that’s actually to the right of the NRA, the Firearms Policy Coalition, had sued over the rule a couple years ago, arguing that the government was overstepping by classifying these gun assembly kits as firearms. But Justice Gorsuch ruled that some assembly kits can actually be covered.
There was some disagreement, though, about how broad or narrow this ruling is. It sounds to me like it depends on the amount of time and energy that goes into putting together one of these guns from one of these kits. Justice Gorsuch singled out a company called Polymer 80, which was responsible for most of these gun kit sales.
They have a buy, build, shoot kit, which contains all the necessary components to put together a gun in 20 minutes. And he said, clearly, this qualifies.
