Today, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a case about ghost guns that is broadly about textual interpretation of certain gun laws but fundamentally about whether a gun, disassembled into its component parts, still counts as a gun at its point of sale. If the answer is “no,” then the highest court in the land will be effectively signing off on a scheme to completely circumvent what gun laws we still have on the books, to the effect of a much more dangerous and bloody country. As with many other such culture war cases, the semantic straining that the pro-gun argument requires is only being entertained at all because it’s an issue of deep significance to the gun lobby. No one would argue with a straight face that, say, a printer or a lamp that arrived disassembled are not what they are — machines capable of creating images and words on paper or illumination. Having to screw a lamp together or install a printer tray doesn’t make this not so. A firearm is a tool designed to expel potentially lethal projectiles at high speed via a discharge of gunpowder, and having to attach the frame to the handle doesn’t magically make it something else. Of course, printers and lamps are not regulated like firearms are, but they are also not instruments designed to kill, which we have a long legal tradition of regulating, regardless of the revisionist history claiming otherwise. Before anyone thinks about how we’re ignoring the Second Amendment, let’s note that this is not a Second Amendment case. The challenge is instead based on the federal government’s reading of an existing federal law that already mandates certain background checks and serial numbers for gun sales. The question is simply whether gun parts and gun kits can reasonably be covered by this law, and this is a question we feel confident can be answered conclusively in the affirmative. This isn’t all just a thought exercise. Ghost guns are a very real problem, an attempt specifically to evade the rules already in place to prevent guns from getting into the hands of those we’ve all decided are not fit to have them — minors, felons, domestic abusers and people with mental imbalances. They’re a problem for law enforcement, too, who began finding the practically untraceable guns at crime scenes after their popularity soared, to the tune of 19,000 in 2021 alone, per Justice Department figures. It’s difficult to really lay out a rationale in favor of unregulated ghost guns that doesn’t boil down to an incredibly rudimentary concept of freedom in the way that a certain type of ideology conceptualizes it: The right to keep and bear arms, from flintlock muskets to AR-15s, transcends all other rights. Gun rights, which in so many cases affect not just the individual asserting them but all the others that person might one day choose to target, are inviolable and cannot be subjected to interference. Despite the high court’s poor trajectory on firearms regulation over the past couple of years, we hope that they can at least be honest about the fact that ghost guns are guns just the same.