Judge Strikes Delaware's Ghost Gun Ban

A federal judge just told Delaware it can't ban you from making or owning your own gun.

U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika ruled Thursday that Delaware's prohibitions on possessing unserialized firearms and privately manufacturing guns at home are facially unconstitutional, granting a permanent injunction for the Firearms Policy Coalition members who sued. It's a win with an asterisk, though—Noreika left intact the state's bans on sharing 3D-printing CAD files and on selling unfinished frames or receivers to someone else.

State of play: The ruling didn't come out of nowhere. Noreika had already blocked enforcement of the possession and manufacturing bans with a preliminary injunction, so Thursday's decision mostly makes that permanent. The heavy lifting came from the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, which had already ruled that computer code isn't protected speech under the First Amendment and that "arms" includes anything necessary for a gun to function—frames and receivers included.

Delaware argued that untraceable guns aren't "in common use" and therefore fall outside Second Amendment protection entirely. Noreika wasn't buying it. The Third Circuit, she noted, already settled that common-use arguments belong in step two of the Bruen analysis, not step one—and serialization has nothing to do with whether something counts as an "arm" in the first place. What matters is whether people customarily use it for self-defense. They do.

The intrigue: Delaware's fallback argument was that ghost guns are tied to "violent crime and criminality." Noreika called that framing out directly, writing that it "analogizes at 'such a high level of generality' that it risks 'water[ing] down the right.'" Her point: virtually any firearm has been used in a crime somewhere. That doesn't make an outright ban constitutional. The real distinction, she wrote, is traceability—not whether the gun itself is dangerous.

"Functionally ghost guns are no different than serialized guns."

Delaware tried historical analogues too—Bowie knife restrictions, trap gun laws, gunpowder regulations. Noreika rejected all of them as too different in both purpose and mechanism to justify a blanket ban.

What gun owners should know: Noreika didn't just strike the law—she sketched out what would pass muster. A serialization requirement for existing home-built guns, a window to register future builds, even material standards for 3D-printed parts could all survive constitutional scrutiny, in her view, because none of those approaches actually blocks someone from keeping or building a firearm. An outright ban on possession or manufacture does.

That's a blueprint state legislatures pushing similar restrictions elsewhere will need to reckon with.

What's next: Delaware could appeal to the Third Circuit, but given that the appellate court already answered most of the underlying legal questions, the state's odds aren't great. More likely: an appeal to preserve the current law while it's pending, paired with new legislation that tries to thread the needle Noreika just laid out—serialization and registration requirements instead of blanket prohibition.