The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) has officially published its new rule redefining the term “firearm” and banning so-called “ghost gun” kits.
Implementation of the rule will begin in 120 days, and in the meantime, expect to see multiple lawsuits from gun-rights groups asking the courts to strike down the rule on constitutional grounds.
The final rule doesn’t depart in any serious way from the original rule the ATF proposed in May of last year. Despite receiving hundreds of thousands of comments from concerned gun owners who opposed the rule, the agency plowed ahead, at the behest of the Biden administration, to unilaterally redefine “firearm” under federal law.
The effect of the rule on build-it-yourself gun kits has justifiably received the most attention. The rule singles out products that allow an unfinished frame or receive to be “readily converted” into a functioning firearm component, and states that these products are now considered “firearms” under federal law.
This new rule doesn’t ban homemade gun kits, but it does subject these kits to the same regulations and background check requirements as other firearms.
The agency says it won’t necessarily consider as “firearms” all unfinished frames or receivers, which could still allow the purchase of certain so-called “80-percent” receivers. But if those receivers ship with dimples or jigs to assist in the machining process, that gun kit will be subject to all rules and regulations governing functioning firearms.
“ATF has maintained and continues to maintain that a partially complete frame or receiver alone is not a frame or receiver if it still requires performance of certain machining operations (e.g., milling out the fire control cavity of an AR-15 billet or blank, or indexing for that operation) because it may not readily be completed to house or hold the applicable fire control components,” the agency said in the rule.
However: “A partially complete billet or blank of a frame or receiver is a ‘frame or receiver’ when it is sold, distributed, or possessed with a compatible jig or template, allowing a person using online instructions and common hand tools to complete the frame or receiver efficiently, quickly, and easily ‘to function as a frame or receiver,” the ATF clarifies.
The rule redefines a handgun “frame” as “the housing or structure for the primary energized component designed to hold back the hammer, striker, bolt, or similar component prior to initiation of the firing sequence (i.e., sear or equivalent).” It also redefines rifle “receiver” as “the housing or structure for the primary component designed to block or seal the breech prior to initiation of the firing sequence (i.e., bolt, breechblock, or equivalent).”
The agency is shutting down one of the primary ways law-abiding gun owners have been able to build firearms without the government’s knowledge or say-so. But in another provision that has received far less media attention, the ATF is making sure that the records of those gun sales never go away.
Prior to this new rule, gun sellers were allowed to dispose of firearm transaction records after 20 years. Now, they’re no longer allowed to destroy those records—ever.
And what happens when a gun store goes out of business? As we’ve covered previously, those records are sent to the ATF, which scans them into an electronic database the agency insists isn’t really a “gun registry.”
It’s still legal to make guns at home. But this new rule makes it more difficult, and it sets up future generations for a day when the federal government possesses a record of every gun transaction in all 50 states.
To read the rule for yourself—including the ATF’s “response” to the comments it received—see below:
has been reviewing firearm-related products for over six years and enjoying them for much longer. With family in Canada, he’s seen first hand how quickly the right to self-defense can be stripped from law-abiding citizens. He escaped that statist paradise at a young age, married a sixth-generation Texan, and currently lives in Tyler. Got a hot tip? Send him an email at jordan@gunsamerica.com.