Supreme Court Upholds ATF Regulation Defining Gun “Parts Kits” as Firearms

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court decided Bondi v. VanDerStok, 604 U.S. __ (2025). It is an administrative law case, not a Second Amendment case, but folks interested in firearms law will still want to know about it. The media has generally described this case as allowing the ATF to ban “ghost guns,” which is not exactly wrong but also is not precise. Read on for more details. Overview. In recent years, more people have been buying gun parts, or gun kits, and completing the assembly of the firearm at home. Manufacturers and purchasers of these products generally have considered them not to be firearms when sold because they are not operable at that point. On this view, they don’t need to be given a serial number and sellers don’t need to be licensed dealers subject to federal oversight. As more of these products have been sold, more built-at-home firearms have been used in criminal activity. In that context, they are often called “ghost guns” because the lack of a serial number and lack of mandatory record-keeping by sellers makes them harder to trace than other firearms. In response to this trend, federal authorities enacted a new regulation, deeming these products to be firearms under federal law. Proponents of the build-at-home kits sued, alleging that the new regulation was inconsistent with the statute it was supposed to be implementing. Lower courts agreed, but the Supreme Court upheld the regulations, at least for now. The statute at issue. The statute [...]