News Roundup

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal regulation requiring, among other things, that those who make or sell “ghost guns” or “gun kits” must mark their products with serial numbers, keep records of their sales, and conduct background checks on buyers. The regulation, first enacted in 2022 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives came in response to a sharp increase in the number of unmarked guns being found at crime scenes around the country, from about 1,600 in 2017 to 19,000 in 2021. Gun manufacturers opposed the Biden-era regulation, arguing that multiple gun parts is not a gun. Writing for the majority in Bondi v. VanDerStok, Justice Neil Gorsuch said the ATF was within its authority under the broad language of the 1968 Gun Control Act to enact the regulation, noting that many gun kits are easy to assemble in less than an hour. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, and wrote separately. Read on for more criminal law news.   HDMI dissent. In another firearm-related case, the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals upheld a California law limiting gun magazine capacity to ten or fewer rounds. In what appears to be a first, a judge on the en banc panel shared a video as part of his dissent. In the video, the judge appears dressed in his robes in his chambers, and goes over the different components of multiple handguns displayed on a table. Speaking from his desk, with a mounted AK-47 displayed on the [...]