Afimag.com –
The US Supreme Court has temporarily reinstated a rule cracking down on the proliferation of firea’rms without serial numbers, known as “ghost guns”, reversing a ruling by a lower court.
In a narrow 5-4 decision on Tuesday, the nation’s highest judicial body ruled to keep in place regulations introduced by the administration of President Joe Biden to restrict “ghost gu’ns”, which can be constructed from separate parts or put together using 3D printers.
The ruling is only temporary, though, while the government appeals the lower court’s decision.
Gu’n rights advocates and businesses had challenged the new rule, arguing the “ghost gu’n” restriction would violate the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
But Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar — the Biden administration’s top lawyer for the Supreme Court — argued that the temporary reinstatement of the “ghost gu’n” rule would not disadvantage those groups.
“The public-safety interests in reversing the flow of ghost gu’n’s to dangerous and otherwise prohibited persons easily outweighs the minor costs that respondents will incur,” she said in a court filing.
More than 19,000 “ghost gu’ns” were seized in criminal investigations in 2021, a tenfold increase in a period of about five years, according to the US Department of Justice.
Issued last year, the Biden administration’s new rule expanded the federal definition of a firea’rm to include unfinished gu’n parts used in “ghost gu’ns”. That, in turn, required licensing and serial numbers for the parts, in an effort to trace them more easily.
