The Supreme Court today, and a 7-2 ruling, upheld Biden-era regulations on so-called ghost guns.

Those are firearms that can be put together at home with partially assembled kits,

making them nearly impossible to trace.

Sales of those guns exploded after they came onto the market, and their use in gun crimes rose significantly too.

Joining us now to talk more about the significance of today's ruling is Jennifer Mascia,

a senior news writer at The Trace, which covers gun violence in America.

Jennifer, welcome back to the News Hour.

Good to be here.

So let's just start off with what this ruling means.

Can you help us understand what it does and also what it doesn't do?

In 2022, President Biden's DOJ implemented a rule requiring gun assembly kits to have serial numbers

and buyers to undergo background checks, basically treating them like any other gun. And these are

parts kits that you can buy online and use to assemble a gun, sometimes in as

little time as 20 minutes.

Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority today, one of the courts' conservative justices,

he said that the regulation of some weapons, parts, and kits is allowed under the

1968 Gun Control Act, which says a weapon

qualifies for regulation if it is capable of being readily converted into a gun. So a gun group

that's actually to the right of the NRA, the firearms policy coalition, had sued over the rule

a couple years ago arguing that the government was overstepping by classifying these gun assembly kits as firearms.

But Justice Gorsuch ruled that some assembly kits can actually be covered.

There was some disagreement, though, about how broad or narrow this ruling is.

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