Ghost Guns and the Second Amendment

The latest boogeyman conjured up by the Biden administration is ghost guns.

In his September 26 executive order on “Combating Emerging Firearms Threats and Improving School-Based Active-Shooter Drills,” President Biden mentioned these ominous “ghost guns”:

One way to continue the progress on reducing gun violence is to stay ahead of emerging violent crime threats involving firearms.  My Administration has always taken these threats seriously.  In April 2021, one of my Administration’s first executive actions to reduce gun violence was directed at stopping the proliferation of firearms without serial numbers, often referred to as “ghost guns.”

The executive order goes on to describe these ghost guns as “unserialized, 3D printed firearms — which can be used for illicit purposes such as gun trafficking, possession by people convicted of felonies or subject to domestic violence restraining orders, or unlawful engagement in the business of manufacturing or selling firearms.” These ghost guns can’t be traced by law enforcement and they “can be rendered undetectable by magnetometers used to secure airports, courthouses, and certain events.” They are even “a significant risk to the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States.”

So, what can the federal government do, constitutionally, about ghost guns?

Absolutely nothing.

Article II of the Constitution defines the powers of the president. It gives no authority to the president to ban or regulate firearms of any kind.

Article I of the Constitution grants all legislative powers to the Congress. But the Constitution is also clear that the legislative power of Congress is not absolute. There are about thirty enumerated congressional powers found in the Constitution, most of them in the eighteen paragraphs of Article I, Section 8. None of them give authority to the Congress to ban or regulate firearms of any kind.

The Second Amendment to the Constitution reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary for the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

The Second Amendment does not grant to any American the positive right to keep and bear arms. It recognizes a preexisting natural right. The Second Amendment is an additional limitation on federal power to infringe upon gun rights besides the fact that no authority is granted to the president or the federal government to infringe upon them in the first place.

So, all of this simply means that the federal government has no authority to ban or regulate firearms of any kind: no pistols, no revolvers, no rifles, no assault rifles, no shotguns, no sawed-off shotguns, no machine guns, and no ghost guns. It also has no authority to restrict how Americans manufacture or modify any of their firearms.

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