By ABBIE VANSICKLE NYTimes News Service
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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld federal restrictions aimed at curtailing access to kits that can be easily assembled into homemade, nearly untraceable firearms, a rare move by a court that has taken an expansive view of gun rights.

In a 7-2 decision, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, one of the court’s conservatives, the justices left in place requirements enacted during the Biden administration as part of a broader effort to combat gun violence by placing restrictions on so-called ghost guns.

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Gorsuch included photographs, unusual in court opinions, to illustrate how one of the gun kits, Polymer80’s “Buy Build Shoot,” came with “all of the necessary components to build” a Glock-style semi-automatic weapon. He wrote that it was “so easy to assemble” that it could be put together in about 20 minutes.

“Plainly, the finished ‘Buy Build Shoot’ kit is an instrument of combat,” Gorsuch wrote, adding that no one would confuse the pistol “with a tool or a toy.”

The ruling in favor of gun regulations is a departure for the court, which has shown itself to be skeptical of them — and of administrative agency power. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, both conservatives, filed dissents.

The “weapon-parts kits themselves do not meet the statutory definition of ‘firearm,’” Thomas wrote, important because Congress in 1968 agreed the government could legally impose some regulations on firearms. “That should end the case.”

Legal experts said the decision was a victory for those advocating more gun regulations.

“Although this is not a Second Amendment ruling, it shows that the justices are not uniformly hostile to gun regulation,” said Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA. “Ghost guns have been found in increasing numbers at crime scenes, and today’s decision should help the problem.”

The Biden administration in 2022 enacted rules tightening access to the weapons kits, after law enforcement agencies reported that ghost guns were exploding in popularity and being used to commit serious crimes.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives estimated that use of the gun components and kits in crime increased tenfold in the six years before the rules were adopted.

Among the regulations: requiring vendors and gunmakers to be licensed to sell the kits, mandating serial numbers on the components so the weapons could be tracked and adding background checks for would-be buyers.

Steven M. Dettelbach, the former director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who shepherded the regulation, urged the Trump administration and Congress to “fully support” the agency to implement the ghost gun regulations. With support from the administration, he said in a statement, “today’s decision can save lives.”

Gun rights groups based their challenge to the regulations by claiming that the government had overstepped its bounds in regulating the gun kits because they did not meet the definition of firearms under the Gun Control Act of 1968.

Opponents of gun regulations argued that most people who bought the kits were hobbyists, not criminals. In legal filings, the groups argued that a majority of firearms used in crimes were traditional weapons that were manufactured professionally.

Lawyers for the government, arguing in October while President Joe Biden was in office, said the guns kits should be regulated as “firearms” because they allowed “anyone with basic tools and access to internet video tutorials to assemble a functional firearm ‘quickly and easily’ — often, in a matter of minutes.”

During the oral argument in Bondi v. VanDerStok, a majority of the justices appeared to favor keeping the rules in place. At least two conservatives, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, raised sharp questions about arguments by the plaintiffs that the administration had overstepped its bounds.

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