Listen Live: Supreme Court hears arguments in challenge to ATF’s ghost gun rule
Washington — The Supreme Court is hearing arguments Tuesday over the Biden administration’s efforts to regulate unserialized firearms called ghost guns, considering for the second time in a matter of months whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Tobacco went too far when it took unilateral action to curb gun violence.
Brought by a group of firearms owners, gun rights groups and manufacturers, the challengers are seeking to invalidate the regulation that seeks to subject ghost guns to the same requirements as commercially made firearms.
But the Biden administration has warned that striking down the rule would give criminals, minors and others who are legally barred from having guns access to kits that can be assembled into a functioning, untraceable firearm in less than 30 minutes.
agreed to allow the Biden administration to enforce the ghost gun rule until it issues a decision on its legality, likely by the end of June 2025.
The Supreme Court divided 5-4 in halting the district court order that struck down the measure, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the three liberal justices in the majority.
Roberts and Barrett’s earlier votes make them key justices to watch, though they do not mean they’ll vote to uphold the measure now that the Supreme Court is considering the merits of the case.
The high court will consider the ghost gun rule just months after it invalidated a separate measure that banned bump stocks, a firearms accessory that increases a semi-automatic rifle’s rate of fire to hundreds of rounds per minute.
In striking down the rule, the Supreme Court’s six-justice conservative majority ruled the ATF exceeded its authority when it issued the ban in 2018 after a mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas, the deadliest in U.S. history.
More
More
Source: cbsnews.com