During oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito compared a ghost gun to an omelet.
The comparison was made during hearings for Garland v. VanDerStok, which challenges a regulation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that defines self-assembly ghost gun kits as firearms. Partially assembled weapons that can be converted to full firearms must also be registered as guns, according to the regulation, introduced in 2022.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar was talking about how a self-assembly gun kit can be easily converted to a fully useable gun with the addition of one additional part when Alito interjected, Newsweek reported.
Alito asked if a component can be defined as a weapon, did it mean a notebook and a pen together can be a shopping list. Prelogar said no.
“If I put on a counter some eggs, some chopped-up ham, some chopped-up pepper and onions, is that a western omelet?” Alito said.
Prelogar said no since the components of a ghost gun can only be used to make a gun.
“The key difference here is that these weapon parts kits are designed and intended to be used as instruments of combat and they have no other conceivable use,” Prelogar said. “And I think the further evidence comes from the fact that respondents themselves agree that a disassembled gun qualifies as a weapon,” she said.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett used a similar food-related argument as Alito.
“Would your answer change if you ordered it from Hello Fresh, and you got a kit and it was like turkey chilly but all of the ingredients are in the kit?” Coney Barrett asked.
“Yes, and I think that presses on the more apt analogy here, which is that we are not suggesting here that scattered components that might have some entirely separate and distinct function could be aggregated and called a weapon in the absence of this kind of evidence that that is their intended purpose and function,” Prelogar said.
“But if you bought from Trader Joe’s some omelet-making kit that had all of the ingredients to make the omelet and maybe included whatever you needed to start the fire to cook the omelet … we would recognize that for what it is.”
