The victorious gun grabbers in this week’s 7-2 Supreme Court decision kept saying that so-called ghost guns are hard to trace and that forcing the registration of their component parts will help law enforcement solve crimes.

That’s a lie.

Their phony argument is that any serialized gun left by a perpetrator at the scene of a crime is easily traceable back to said perp. Which, in theory, is true. But think about it: Since when does a criminal leave his weapon at the scene? Guns are expensive, and criminals tend to be repeat offenders. Does it make any sense that a guy would leave the tool of his trade at the scene? When was the last time your electrician left his toolbox at your house?

With typical demagogic flair, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer intoned, “Ghost guns have been a terror on our streets, haunting our communities, and taking lives.”

But as author and researcher John Lott puts it, “In real life, guns are only left at the scene of a crime when the gunmen have been seriously injured or killed. With both the criminal and weapon present at the scene, police can solve these crimes without registration. In the exceedingly unusual instances where registered guns are left at the scene, they aren’t registered to the person who committed the crime.”

Indeed, as Lott adds, “Police in jurisdictions from Hawaii to Chicago to Pennsylvania to New York that have had registration for decades can’t point to any crimes they have been able to solve with it. Even entire countries such as Canada haven’t had success.” Other gun-grabbing states have spent lavishly building databases with the unique ballistic identification of every new gun sold — only to do away with those worthless repositories.

“Why do Democrats keep pushing a policy that costs so much and has no crime-reducing benefits?” asks Lott. “Someday,” he says, “knowing who owns guns will help them to target their confiscation efforts.”

And so, by the aforementioned 7-2 majority, with only stalwarts Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito in dissent, the Supreme Court upheld a set of Biden-era rules created in 2022 by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that require background checks, serial numbers, and sales receipts for the do-it-yourself gun kits that are usually purchased online. The Court said that these kits count as firearms under the 1968 Gun Control Act and can therefore be regulated just as conventional guns.

As Justice Neil Gorsuch argued, some of the kits in question make gun assembly so easy that they should be seen as firearms for legal purposes. “Perhaps a half hour of work is required before anyone can fire a shot,” wrote Gorsuch in his majority opinion. “But even as sold, the kit comes with all necessary components, and its intended function as instrument of combat is obvious. Really, the kit’s name says it all: ‘Buy Build Shoot.’”

Last year, during oral arguments, Justice Alito countered by saying that chopped eggs, ham, onions, and peppers don’t automatically make an omelet.

In any case, that’s what this is about: defining what constitutes a gun. Not restricting the right to bear arms; only empowering the state to keep more thorough records. But by requiring all this additional paperwork and recordkeeping, the ruling creates an additional regulatory headache for gun dealers — and that’s certainly part of the gun grabbers’ calculus.

The ruling is an odd departure from a Court that has looked with increasing skepticism at those who would encroach on our Second Amendment right to bear arms. Wednesday’s ruling didn’t in any real sense restrict that right, only add some additional regulatory hoop-jumping to it, but it’s a departure nonetheless.

The case is a technical one, with its essence involved in what specific components make a gun a gun. For more than 50 years, federal law has drawn this distinction between two key parts, the frame and the receiver, and the rest of the gun parts — the barrel, the trigger, the firing pin, the magazine, and the like. As Charles C.W. Cooke wrote last fall at National Review:

Since the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, the term “lower receiver” has been held to cover only those finished devices that can be attached to the rest of the gun without further amendment. But, in 2022, the Biden administration attempted to alter this unilaterally. Henceforth, the ATF announced that year, the term “receiver” would “include a partially complete, disassembled, or nonfunctional frame or receiver, including a frame or receiver parts kit, that is designed to or may readily be completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to function as a … receiver.”

Keep in mind, though, that homemade guns aren’t something new. As Lott notes, they’ve been around since before the States were United. “But now,” he writes, “their production has become nearly impossible to regulate. With 3-D metal printers, people can now make weapons that are indistinguishable from those purchased in stores.”

Lott says the ruling “may finally be bringing some sanity to gun control regulations,” but we, as citizens in a free republic, can’t let our guard down. In his dissent, Justice Thomas argued that the ruling could threaten the hugely popular AR platform because an AR-15 can be made fully automatic “with relative ease” and thus subject to the same regulation as a machine gun.

Gorsuch called that fear “misplaced.” But as Thomas argued in his conclusion, Congress could’ve authorized the ATF’s expanded regulations, but it chose not to — ostensibly for a reason.

“The majority,” Thomas wrote, “charts a different course that invites unforeseeable consequences and offers no limiting principle. I respectfully dissent.”