Democrats have been trying for generations to limit the scope of the Second Amendment, including with a rule imposed during the Biden administration.

The measure imposed new regulations on so-called “ghost guns” that are disassembled when sold. 

As The Hill reported, that rule was struck down in court this week:

U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor held that the 2022 measure, which required that self-assembled guns be treated like any other firearm, conflicts with the nation’s “historical tradition” of personal gunsmithing and self-manufacture of firearms.

“The Court cannot conclude that the Final Rule’s imposition of ambiguous and far-reaching regulations, which would restrict access to component parts thereby inhibiting home gunsmithing, comports with the Second Amendment,” O’Connor, an appointee of former President George W. Bush,wrote.

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He also determined the rule was unconstitutionally vague in violation of the Due Process Clause.

The ruling sparked some social media discussion:

Here’s the full text from the post above:

A judge on Tuesday ruled against a Biden-era crackdown on “ghost guns.”

The Biden administration attacked so-called ghost guns not because they are driving deadly crimes, but because they represent a way that citizens can avoid some of the bureaucratic red tape designed to restrict gun ownership. Since citizens can put the guns together using kits instead of buying them through manufacturers, the guns do not have serial numbers, making government surveillance much harder.

Gun rights advocates are already celebrating the new ruling that the ghost gun regulations violated not only the Second Amendment, but also the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Forbes and Everytown Research, even while trying to gin up fear of and hatred for ghost guns, had to admit in 2024 that such firearms made up only about 1.5% of recovered guns at crime scenes across more than 30 cities. That number fluctuated somewhat depending on which city or state you were looking at, but the overall numbers were very low. Federal authorities under Joe Biden kept saying that the number of ghost guns that police seized had increased astronomically in the last few years, but the sources seemed reluctant to state what percentage of those guns were connected to crimes versus guns the police seized purely because they didn’t have serial numbers.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) received 45,000 reports of suspected ghost guns between 2016 and 2021, but it is not clear how many of these reports were accurate. In 2022, ATF received 620,000 trace requests, of which only 19,000 were actually ghost guns. Gun Owners of America insisted in 2022 that criminals committed more violent crimes with blunt objects than with ghost guns in America. In short, the hard data does not seem to support the argument that ghost guns drove a massive crime surge. Democrats hate ghost guns because of the surveillance aspect, not because they are worried about violent crime.

The Founding Fathers saw the right to keep and bear arms as the right that protected all others, the fundamental guarantee against foreign invasion and domestic tyranny. After all, there never could have been a Revolution and the founding of an independent America to begin if so many colonists had not had their own personal weaponry with which to fight Great Britain. That is why the British tried to seize firearms and gunpowder whenever they could. Without the Second Amendment, how are any other parts of the Bill of Rights to be safe from assault?

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And the fact that the Biden administration was so aggressive in attacking gun rights is not coincidence. The same administration also undermined free speech, freedom of religion, the right to a speedy trial, and multiple other constitutional rights. They are all connected.

The USA Herald added these details:

The timing is what makes this ruling extraordinary. The U.S. Supreme Court weighed in on this exact regulation last year, and in a 7-2 decision, upheld it — but on much narrower grounds. The justices weren’t asked whether the rule was constitutional; they were asked whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had the statutory authority to write it in the first place. The Court said yes, siding with the government on that technical question and overturning an earlier ruling O’Connor himself had issued striking the rule down as regulatory overreach.

This time, O’Connor took a different route entirely. Rather than revisiting whether ATF exceeded its authority under existing firearms law, he went straight at the constitutional core of the rule — and found it wanting on two separate fronts. Gun rights organizations, including Defense Distributed, argued the regulation effectively criminalized a wide swath of ordinary conduct: buying parts, assembling a firearm for personal use, exercising what they see as a fundamental right to self-manufacture.

 

Here’s some additional coverage:



This is a Guest Post from our friends over at WLTReport. View the original article here.

 

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