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Last week, the Supreme Court issued its decision in Bondi v. VanDerStok (formerly known as Garland v. VanDerStok), holding that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) had not exceeded its authority when it advanced a new rule designed to regulate the private manufacturing of firearms. The rule, which was proposed and implemented by the Biden-Harris administration in 2022, expanded the original definition of “firearms” that was provided in the Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA) to include “weapons parts kits” and partially complete “frames” and “receivers”—items which had previously fallen outside the regulatory umbrella of the ATF. 

Although many viewed VanDerStok as just another separation of powers case that probed the extent to which an executive branch agency could interpret alleged ambiguities in the law, it was more than that. VanDerStok was the latest effort to check the increasingly common practice of executive agencies—which are not accountable to the people—unilaterally legislating away long-held rights of Americans. 

The Supreme Court did not view the challenge this broadly; instead, it limited its focus to whether Congress in 1968 had provided just the right amount of margin (a “Goldilocks’s amount”) in the “text, context and structure” of the GCA to provide an opening for the ATF to redefine what counts as a “firearm” in 2022. Seven of the nine Justices decided that it had.

In the text of the GCA as passed in 1968, Congress defined a “firearm” as: “(A) any weapon . . . which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive; (B) the frame or receiver of any such weapon . . . .” The question for the Court was whether this definition could properly be interpreted to include “weapons parts kits,” partially complete “frames” and “receivers,” and similar precursor products. Notably, although Congress has had ample opportunity over the last fifty years to amend the GCA to expressly cover the precursor materials and firearms parts kits necessary for the private making of firearms, it has repeatedly refused to do so.

Justice Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, ignored this fact. Instead, he concluded that the new rule was not “facially inconsistent with the GCA,” and that the regulatory changes it made thus did not requiring new lawmaking by Congress. Part of his reasoning turned on technological developments and the breadth of Congress’s delegation. Gorsuch found that there had been “profound changes in how guns are made,” with “3D printing and reinforced polymers” making the private manufacture of firearms much easier, and that Congress had given the ATF broad authority to “prescribe [those] rules and regulations . . . necessary to carry out the GCA.”

But, as Justice Thomas made clear in his dissent, the “law hasn’t changed,” only the ATF’s “interpretation of it.” Justice Thomas pointed out that “Congress could have authorized ATF to regulate any part of a firearm or any object readily convertible into one . . . But, it did not.” It limited such regulatory power to the items specifically defined in the 1968 legislation. 

If there is a silver lining here, it is that Justice Gorsuch was very careful to limit the holding to parts that require little to no expertise or special tools to assemble into a firearm. While emphasizing that some parts and kits allow for easy conversion into a functioning firearm and therefore fall under the regulatory umbrella of the GCA—and that because this was a facial challenge, one valid application was sufficient to save the rule—Justice Gorsuch left open the possibility that other products “may be so incomplete or cumbersome to assemble that they cannot fairly be described as weapons capable of ready conversion . . . [or] frames or receivers,” and therefore could not be regulated in the same manner.

So we can expect additional litigation in the lower courts when the regulation is applied to other—perhaps less user friendly—firearm precursor parts. That is assuming, of course, that the Trump administration does not modify or repeal the 2022 rule and other Biden-era ATF regulations that sought to regulate away the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding Americans. President Trump has ordered Attorney General Bondi to compile a list of rules and other executive actions that undermine our Second Amendment-protected rights. The regulations at issue in VanDerStok ought to make that list.