Garland v. VanDerStok: A Supreme Court Ghost Story
In early October, the US Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Garland v. VanDerStok, a case disputing the Biden administration's attempts to regulate "ghost guns" --- firearms built at home, often from pre-supplied parts kits, rather than manufactured in mass quantities and sold with individual serial numbers.
The issue, Justin Jouvenal writes at the Washington Post, is "whether weapons parts kits that can be readily assembled count as guns under the Gun Control Act, and whether a partially completed frame or receiver ... can be regulated under the same law. The case does not directly implicate Second Amendment rights."
Except, of course, that it does. Like a forlorn stood-up date, the Second Amendment continues to exist even if those who pretend they're going steady with it pretend it doesn't. It's part of "the Supreme Law of the Land," and its grammatical and historical meaning is unambiguous: Any law or regulation which infringes "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" is unconstitutional and, therefore, void.
The Supreme Court's job isn't to determine whether an unconstitutional regulation conforms to the meaning of an unconstitutional law.
The Supreme Court's job is to forbid enforcement of the unconstitutional.
When the court ghosts the Second Amendment, it does the opposite of its job and empowers criminals to impose their law-violating ways on the rest of us.
Cute repartee --- like justice Samuel Alito's leading question of whether an assortment of uncooked ingredients constitutes an omelet, and just Amy Coney Barrett's smug retort ("Would your answer change if you ordered it from Hello Fresh?)" doesn't change that.
While it's true that a box containing an unfinished receiver and a kit for completing that receiver is, by definition, not a firearm and therefore can't be regulated under the Gun Control Act, it's also true that the Gun Control Act isn't a law because it conflicts with a higher law that forbids its existence and enforcement.
When the justices avoid that issue and instead spend time entertaining specious arguments over word meanings in unconstitutional regulations, they're not "working" --- they're loitering and kibitzing. If they were honest about what they're doing, they'd resign, or at least dock their own pay for the wasted time.
It's also true that even if the Second Amendment and the Supreme Court didn't exist, all human beings would still enjoy an unalienable right to create (or acquire through voluntary purchase, trade, or gift) and possess any weapons it pleased them to have.
Fortunately, neither the Biden administration nor the Supreme Court have any actual power to make Americans' hundreds of millions of guns disappear. They can get away with verbally ghosting us --- but we can, and certainly will, physically ghost them and their diktats.