A federal judge in Texas has struck down the Biden administration's ghost-gun rule sixteen months after the Supreme Court let it stand, by answering a question the justices deliberately left alone. On August 18, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor in Fort Worth ruled the ATF's 2022 "frame or receiver rule" unconstitutional and permanently blocked its enforcement against the two groups that sued [1].
The argument O'Connor accepted has a genuine historical core, and it is worth stating in its strongest form before setting out what the rule actually did. The plaintiffs' position is that building your own firearm is not a modern loophole but an old and ordinary practice. "Self-manufacture of firearms in America was common and indeed foundational to establishing our Nation," O'Connor wrote [1]. On that reading, a person who assembles a gun at home for personal use is doing something Americans have done since before there was a federal government to regulate it.
What the rule required sits against that history. The 2022 regulation treated the buildable kits and partially finished parts sold to home builders like finished guns: manufacturers had to add serial numbers, obtain licenses, and run background checks on buyers, the same obligations that apply to completed firearms [1]. The point was traceability. A serialized part can be tracked when a gun is recovered at a crime scene; an unserialized kit cannot.
O'Connor held that requirement unconstitutional on two grounds. He found it violated the Second Amendment, and he found it void for vagueness under the Fifth Amendment, meaning the rule did not give people fair notice of what it prohibited [1]. The plaintiffs were Defense Distributed, a company that publishes firearm-manufacturing files, and the Second Amendment Foundation [1]. The order permanently blocks enforcement of the rule against them.
The reason this ruling can undo a rule the Supreme Court upheld lies in what the high court actually decided. In March 2025 the justices sustained the frame-or-receiver rule, but they ruled only on whether the ATF had exceeded its statutory authority in writing it, and they avoided the constitutional questions entirely [1]. Those were the questions left on the table, and they are the ones O'Connor has now answered in the plaintiffs' favor.
