Regulating ghost guns seems like a no-brainer. Thankfully, most Supreme Court justices agreed.

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In 2022, President Joe Biden enlisted the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to enact measures that would restrict purchase of gun kits. Gun kits are synonymous with ghost guns. ATF determined that future purchases of these kits would require serial numbers, sales receipts, age verification (buyers must be at least 21) and background checks of potential buyers, much like buying a gun from a dealer.

Seems like a common sense decision, right? The recent Supreme Court decision upholding those rules was made after President Donald Trump ordered a review of federal gun laws.

So, when debating the gun kit law that the justices upheld 7-2 on Wednesday, with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting, one might ask: Who would want a gun kit, and who believes gun kits should be legal to both buy and sell?

Gun kits are basically unassembled guns that, before the ATF restrictions, required no serial numbers or identifying features. They take approximately half an hour to assemble, based on the kit’s level of completeness. Once assembled, they perform much the same as a gun bought from a dealer. The difference being that, when left at the scene of a shooting, or found as a result of a search warrant, they cannot be traced back to a legal purchase or owner. So to answer the question of who would want the kits to be legal, there are two groups: gun enthusiasts and criminals, especially criminal gangs.

Gun enthusiasts contend that the benefits of gun kits, like the popular Buy Build Shoot kit, include the ability to customize one’s guns, gain knowledge of the functionality and mechanics of one’s weapons, and possibly save money in the process. Gang members couldn’t care less about those benefits but rather appreciate the untraceability of ghost guns, which offer impunity and anonymity when the weapons are recovered and examined by law enforcement.

The ability of law enforcement to trace ownership of guns is critical when working a criminal case involving the discharge of firearms. And while it can be a circuitous process, it’s usually possible to determine where the gun in question came from and who originally purchased it. This process has accounted for countless criminal cases being solved.

Sales of the homemade firearms rapidly grew as the kits came into the market. “Fewer than 1,700 were recovered by law enforcement in 2017, but that number grew to 27,000 in 2023, according to Justice Department data,” a story by the Associated Press said.

Seems like a common sense no-brainer, right? So what reasoning could the dissenting justices use?

Justice Thomas wrote that the kits are only firearm parts and shouldn’t be subject to regulations that could open the door to rules on other popular weapons. I might be exaggerating, but Justice Thomas’ reasoning would allow someone to purchase hand grenades online, but only if the detonator was in a separate compartment.

Hopefully this is not merely a vengeful Trumpian exercise in canceling everything his predecessor did, regardless of its merit. Like Biden’s executive order addressing gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination. Or Trump’s new border and immigration policies, or his dismissal of all DEI programs, teaching of critical race theory, pay equity and transparency, racial and gender equality and restrictions on oil-drilling sites deemed environmentally dangerous or infringing on sacred grounds, etc., etc.

Not that the current president has a grudge to settle against the former administration, but some of the newer executive orders seem to border on “pounding sand.” After all, the Trump administration did press for a federal prohibition against bump stocks like the one the Las Vegas shooter used in October 2017 to fire more than 1,100 rounds in 11 minutes, killing 58 people outright and injuring more than 500. Another common sense policy that was unfortunately struck down in June 2024 by the Supreme Court, which ruled that the ATF exceeded its authority by calling guns equipped with bump stocks “machine guns.”

While it may seem simple to enact what many would consider common sense gun policies, while there are Supreme Court justices arguing that buying an unassembled gun kit is not the same as buying a gun, we will continue to spin our wheels. After all, does a completed puzzle constitute the picture it presents or does it simply remain a bunch of oddly shaped pieces?

Richard Greelis, of Bloomington, is a retired police officer.