GOA: Federal Judge Rules Biden’s Ghost Gun Rule Unconstitutional and Too Vague to Enforce

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

FORT WORTH, TX — Gun Owners of America says a federal judge has struck down the Biden administration’s ghost gun rule, and this time on constitutional grounds rather than statutory ones. In an announcement posted to its Instagram account, GOA said Judge Reed O’Connor ruled against the ATF regulation and quoted the order as holding that “[T]he Final Rule is unconstitutional under the 2nd Amendment & void for vagueness under the Due Process Clause of the 5th Amendment.”

The rule at issue came out of an April 11, 2022 Rose Garden announcement. According to an account published on GOA’s website, the regulation banned the business of manufacturing unserialized “buy-build-shoot” kits that could be bought without a background check, treated those kits as firearms under the Gun Control Act, required commercial manufacturers to be licensed and to serialize the frame or receiver, and required sellers to become federally licensed and run background checks. GOA Senior Vice President Erich Pratt said at the time that President Biden “basically admitted in the Rose Garden that he couldn’t get gun control passed in Congress,” and called the move an end run around the legislature.

The Supreme Court already looked at this rule once. GOA notes that the justices upheld it on statutory grounds in Vanderstok v. Garland. A statutory ruling answers a narrow question, whether the agency’s reading of the words Congress wrote was permissible. It does not answer whether the rule squares with the Second Amendment, and it does not answer whether the rule is clear enough to enforce against a citizen. GOA says O’Connor has now answered both, and describes the order as one that “defeats one of the last major remaining infringements by the Biden Administration.”

GOA is also using the moment to lobby the executive branch, saying it is “calling on the Department of Justice to stand down and not to appeal victories for the Second Amendment,” from the National Firearms Act to homemade firearms. I covered the NFA half of that fight in 27 States Walk Out Same Day, 15 Still File the Form 4: The Full State List After the Midnight Suppressor Injunction, and GOA is asking for the same outcome here that gun owners got there: no appeal.

What I am not going to do is tell you what this ruling lets you build, buy, or sell. GOA’s post does not say who the order covers, and the comments under it are full of people asking exactly that question. The government also retains its appellate options unless and until it says otherwise, and GOA’s plea to the Justice Department is a request, not a resolution. Talk to a lawyer in your state before you change your behavior based on a screenshot.

I will continue tracking this ruling and will report on the actual text of Judge O’Connor’s order once it is available.