Highlights: Late Monday afternoon, the Supreme Court handed down a very brief order establishing that sellers of “ghost guns,” weapons that are sold dismantled in ready-to-assemble kits, must comply with the same gun safety laws and anti-crime laws as any other gun seller.
Judge Reed O’Connor, a former Republican Capitol Hill staffer known for handing down dubiously reasoned opinions that benefit Republican causes, effectively tried to neutralize the Supreme Court’s August 2023 decision.
While the Court’s August order was a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the Court’s three Democratic appointees, no justice publicly dissented from the order handed down on Monday — which suggests that even the four justices who dissented in August may have viewed O’Connor’s most recent ruling in favor of ghost gun sellers as an act of defiance that needed to be quashed.
This really isn’t that big a ruling. It was basically just on whether an injunction should be in effect during the course of a lawsuit. In practice it just means the two plaintiffs can’t sell their products until at least the end of the case (assuming they win). If they lose they’d be barred from making those sales, but that would have always happened regardless of the SC stepping in.