By Douglas V. Gibbs
The term “Ghost Gun” was a creation of the anti-gun left who would love to confiscate every firearm in America. The term is a clever piece of political branding that implies something sinister and untraceable, when in reality all we are talking about is firearms that people assemble themselves.
In Rigby v. Jennings, Judge Maryellen Noreika permanently enjoined Delaware’s bans on possessing and self-manufacturing untraceable firearms, ruling the state laws as clear violations of the right to keep and bear arms, using the Second Amendment as the foundation. The court specifically held that “an untraceable firearm is an Arm under the Second Amendment” and that firearm frames and receivers are likewise protected “Arms” under the Constitution.
The fascinating part of the ruling is that the court addressed the historical tradition approach, as we first saw in the Bruen Case.
Delaware attempted to justify its ban by pointing to historical laws on clubs, Bowie knives, and other weapons, but the Third Circuit had already rejected those analogues as “too late, the wrong ‘why,’ or the wrong ‘how.'” The court determined that an outright ban on a class of arms used for self-defense is not “relevantly similar” to those historical rules.
The broader purpose of the Second Amendment is not really about guns, anyway. The right to keep and bear arms was always intended as a safeguard against tyranny and as a means to ensure “the security of a free state.” The court’s recognition that the Second Amendment includes “the ancillary right to acquire [arms]” by building them at home reinforces this fundamental purpose.
This ruling also highlights how anti-gun rights advocates often use misleading terminology to advance their agenda. As the Firearms Policy Coalition noted, “Governments do not get to erase the Second Amendment by calling protected arms ‘ghost guns,’ ‘assault weapons,’ or whatever other pejorative labels they invent.”
The Delaware case is part of a broader pattern of courts rejecting similar restrictions. In a separate case, Chief District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled that the ATF’s “frame or receiver rule” was unconstitutional on both Fifth Amendment and Second Amendment grounds, further cementing the principle that unfinished frames and receivers enjoy the same constitutional protections as completed firearms.
While Delaware’s commercial distribution rules and CAD/3D-print file ban survived this particular challenge, the core principle that law-abiding citizens have the right to make their own firearms has been firmly established.
This represents an important check on government overreach and a reaffirmation of the natural right to self-defense and self-reliance.
The only error in the case is the reliance on the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment applies to federal laws, and the Delaware bans were pieces of state legislation. Therefore, the proper constitutional argument would not be the Second Amendment as much as Article I, Section 20 of the Delaware State Constitution, enacted in 1987, which reads, “A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home, and State, and for hunting and recreational use.”
The provision, according to local state jurisprudence, also affirms the fundamental right to public carry. The term “arms” is applied in the same way as the Second Amendment, supporting the courts recent ruling in Rigby v. Jennings.
— Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
