A small company operating out of a warehouse on the edge of a sagebrush airstrip near Carson City, Nev., temporarily halted its operations this summer, which gun control groups hailed as a major victory in their fight to stem the spread of unregulated firearms in America.
The company, Polymer80, was for a time the country’s largest manufacturer and online seller of the components used to assemble the untraceable homemade weapons known as “ghost guns.” The weapons fueled a surge in gun crime after the onset of the coronavirus pandemic across the country, particularly in California, according to law enforcement officials.
Hit by a wave of lawsuits, the company also struggled to cope with new regulations imposed by the Biden administration that restricted the sale of the components. In July, Polymer80’s embattled owner announced on social media, “we are shut down… for now” to evaluate the feasibility of his business model.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will consider a challenge, brought by gun rights groups and supported by industry leaders, that seeks to invalidate the Biden administration rules, which are from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Those rules, completed in late 2022, require vendors who sell partly finished frames of Glock-style handguns — the pistol grip and firing mechanism — to treat them like fully completed firearms subject to federal regulations.
The case has profound implications: The number of ghost guns recovered at crime scenes has fallen since the enactment of the rules, which mandated the use of serial numbers and required buyers to undergo background checks, according to statistics compiled by law enforcement agencies around the country.
Local officials and gun control groups fear that overturning the restrictions could reverse the recent improvements. They also say it could pave the way for a sweeping expansion of a business they say offers untraceable weapons to those banned under federal law from possessing them: criminals, people with histories of mental illness and teenagers, the victims and perpetrators of some of the most horrific crimes involving ghost guns.
“It’s a public safety nightmare,” said Eric Tirschwell, the chief litigation counsel for Everytown for Gun Safety, which represented two Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies who were shot and seriously injured in 2020 by a man using a weapon assembled from Polymer80 parts.
“It seems certain the business will spring back to life if the court strikes it down,” Mr. Tirschwell said. “A lot of companies will spring back, and new ones will come into this marketplace.”
Gun rights groups have argued that the components do not meet the definition of a “firearm” as laid out in the Gun Control Act of 1968, one of the main laws regulating the industry. In issuing the rules, the Biden administration has overstepped, they have said in court filings, usurping the role of Congress, which has thus far failed to enact legislation regulating gun components like the ones sold by Polymer80.
But local law enforcement agencies, along with city and state governments, have contended that the homemade gun parts and kits contributed to a deadly spike in the number of ghost guns used in serious crimes — a tenfold increase between 2016 and 2022, according to A.T.F. estimates cited by the White House.
Ghost guns have become a scourge in many of the nation’s biggest cities. In California, the proliferation of the weapons — along with the increased popularity of cheap conversion devices that effectively transform semiautomatic weapons into machine guns — has been a main driver of pandemic-era street violence.
The number of ghost guns recovered from crime scenes in the state rose to about 11,000 in 2021, from 174 in 2016, according to data compiled by California’s Department of Justice.
The use of the weapons by minors has been especially horrifying.
In September 2023, two 14-year-olds in Baltimore fired a ghost gun, prompting lockdowns at three nearby schools. In November 2021, a 13-year-old boy in Georgia accidentally shot and killed his 14-year-old sister in his home after getting into a fight with two prospective buyers of his homemade guns. In July 2021, a seventh grader in California was accidentally shot with a ghost gun in his own home — crying in pain and disbelief that a weapon that resembled a toy could end his life in an instant.
In 2017, a Polymer80 executive privately conceded in internal emails that sales to minors was an issue that presented itself in the course of business. Those emails were made public as part of a $5 million settlement in 2021 with the City of Los Angeles after the shooting of the sheriff’s deputies.
David L. Borges, the company’s co-founder, writing to the organizer of a promotional gun giveaway, cited the “minor concern” of offering a pistol to a winner who turned out to be younger than the federal age requirement of 21.
“Not sure it’s a big deal, but wanted to bring that to your attention as a potential issue,” Mr. Borges wrote.
“I get calls periodically on our pistol sales because some 16 year old kid has ordered a pistol using his parents address and credit card,” he added. “Mom’s get pretty furious and I hate being on the other end of those tail-tucking calls — a woman’s wrath is something else as I’m sure you know.”
Mr. Borges did not respond to a request for comment.
It is too early to tell whether the rules enacted in 2022 have had a major impact on the sales of the components — though the closure of Polymer80, whose parts were recovered at many crime scenes, is significant, according to law enforcement officials.
But recent data collected by cities and states shows a reversal of the rise of ghost guns, which could be attributable to the regulations, overall waning of violent crime rates, or both.
Recoveries of ghost guns at crime scenes in California — whose restrictive gun laws helped spur demand for the homemade weapons — are falling. Recoveries of homemade weapons are still high in Los Angeles, the hardest-hit city in the country, but the 2023 level was about 25 percent below the previous year. The drop has been more modest in San Francisco and Oakland.
The same holds for cities on the East Coast, with a small decrease in Philadelphia and officials in Washington reporting a drop in ghost gun recoveries from 500 in 2022 to 407 in 2023, according to data compiled by proponents of upholding the A.T.F. rules.
“In the relatively short time that the final rule has been in effect, the rule appears to have caused a measurable reduction in the use of ghost guns,” lawyers representing a coalition of cities and prosecutors wrote in a brief supporting the rule.
“Although ghost gun recoveries have decreased in the limited time the rule has been in effect, ghost guns have plainly not been eliminated and, as noted below, violent crimes committed with ghost guns have continued to occur,” they added.
The groups challenging the rules do not dispute that the components targeted by the regulation have been used in crimes. Instead they have questioned whether the components can be “readily” converted into guns — the definition of a functional firearm in the 1968 law.
They have also accused the Biden administration of trying to reverse the venerated tradition of private gun making that dates to the founding of the country.
“In colonial America, because firearms were essential for food and protection, gun makers appeared wherever the English settled,” lawyers representing the National Rifle Association wrote in a brief to the court. “Many of these gun makers worked in isolated cabins and completed all the work themselves. Their craft was widely celebrated and unregulated.”
Gun rights groups argue that a vast majority of consumers who purchase components for homemade guns are hobbyists, and they point out that an overwhelming majority of firearms used in crimes, about 85 percent, are manufactured professionally.
But Steven M. Dettelbach, the A.T.F. director, has said he believes that many of the ghost gun parts sold online are intended for nefarious purposes, citing the growing popularity of homemade weapons among drug gangs seeking to obtain untraceable firepower.
“They set up a little manufacturing business, to not just make them for myself, but give them to my colleagues, my cohorts, my co-conspirators,” Mr. Dettelbach told CBS News in an interview that aired in March.
“They’ll be sitting there in somebody’s garage in Jersey, and there’ll be, you know, a key of cocaine and a little shop,” he said. “It’s like a new position in a gang. Now as an armorer, I’m the one who makes the guns for the gang, right, to distribute to the gang, right?”
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