It's getting harder to buy "ghost guns" — the term critics use for firearms that are made from kits, and are often impossible to trace.
First the Biden Administration cracked down: in 2022, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives issued a rule that the kits should be considered firearms under federal law, which requires them to be sold with serial numbers and a background check.
Then the gun kit makers were hit by a wave of lawsuits. One of the most successful was Philadelphia's suit against two of the biggest gun kit sellers, Polymer80 and JSD Supply, which agreed last April to stop selling the kits in a large region around the city for four years.
Now Polymer80 has apparently shut down altogether. The website isn't available, no one answers the sales phone number, and a social media post that appears to be from the CEO says the company is shut down "for now." The company did not respond to NPR's requests for comment.
Others in the build-it-yourself firearms industry assume it was the combination of tougher regulations and lawsuits that took the company down.
"It was too successful. Polymer is a victim of its own success," says Cody Wilson, who's known as a pioneer of some aspects of do-it-yourself gun manufacturing, as well as his plea-bargain a few years later in a sexual assault case. He says his own company, in Austin, Tex., has faced similar legal pressures.
"Defense Distributed has been involved in maybe 15 federal court cases," he says. "Often these are at the direction of groups like Giffords, Everytown -- from our point of view, the usual suspects."
The gun control groups take pride in their efforts to limit the spread of what they call "ghost guns," and they say Polymer80s apparent shut-down proves their argument about who's been buying the kits.
"Their customer base are people who don't want to pass a background check, who don't want a record of the sale, who don't want a serial number," says David Pucino, legal director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which represented Philadelphia in its lawsuit.
"An enormous share of their customers are gun traffickers, or people who are otherwise not legally allowed to purchase a gun," he says.
But some gun rights groups says the lawsuits and regulation run afoul of what some see as an American tradition of privately-made firearms.
"It's what got us through the Revolutionary War," says Mike McCoy, director for the Center to Keep and Bear Arms at the Mountain States Legal Foundation. "The British, one of the wise things they did when the war first got started is they shut off importation of firearms. It was the private manufacturing of firearms in that period which really helped continue to arm the rebels."
His organization is one of the plaintiffs in a court challenge to the ATF's 2022 rule classifying the kits as firearms. A federal court in northern Texas agreed with them that the ATF overstepped its authority, and now the case is headed to the Supreme Court. Oral arguments are on October 8.
The case is a technical one, centered on regulations and administrative law, but McCoy thinks it could still have a practical effect on gun rights.
"Depending upon how the Supreme Court decides, it inevitably would have some impact on the Second Amendment in the sense of if the government is able to restrict the private manufacturing of firearms in this manner," McCoy says.
The Gifford Law Center's Pucino also thinks the now-dormant Polymer80 is looking to the Supreme Court.
"Their play at this point is to try to just hold on, and hopefully the Supreme Court will throw them a lifeline and will strike down this rule," Pucino says. "And they can get back to churning out these products that have been supplying the criminal market in firearms."
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