A federal judge ruled Thursday that Delaware’s ban on making and possessing self-manufactured firearms, often called “ghost guns,” violates the Second Amendment.
The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware issued the decision in Rigby v. Jennings, a case brought against the state’s enforcement of H.B. 125, the 2021 law that criminalized possessing, selling, or manufacturing firearms without serial numbers.
The court’s opinion was blunt about the harm the law caused gun owners who complied with it. “Plaintiffs have been forced to dispossess themselves of firearms they lawfully owned before Delaware passed the Possession and Manufacturing and Assembly Bans,” the ruling states. “Now the only thing preventing them from exercising their Second Amendment rights to repossess those firearms is an unconstitutional statute.”
The court added that such a deprivation, “for even minimal periods of time, unquestionably constitutes irreparable injury.”
H.B. 125 was pushed through the Delaware legislature by Democrats who argued homemade firearms posed a unique threat to public safety. State Sen. Nicole Poore said at the time that “these homemade weapons can be just as deadly as other types of firearms and are potentially easier to obtain for people legally barred from owning a gun.”
Poore also called the untraceable weapons an “obvious public safety” concern and said she was glad lawmakers were acting to outlaw them “early in their evolution.”
The Firearms Policy Coalition, one of the plaintiffs behind the lawsuit, announced the ruling on X, calling it “a major Second Amendment victory” and confirming the court held that Delaware’s bans on possessing and self-manufacturing so-called ghost guns are unconstitutional.
The ruling marks another setback for state-level efforts to restrict homemade firearms, adding Delaware to the list of jurisdictions where such bans have run into constitutional trouble in federal court.
