The Constitution does not cover gun parts like a suppressor, a court concluded.
Some gun parts are not covered by the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment, a federal appeals court has decided.
“Possession of firearms themselves is covered by the plain text of the Second Amendment, possession of firearm accessories is not,” U.S. Circuit Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod said in the Feb. 6 opinion.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit took up an appeal from a firearm dealer whose Louisiana home was searched by federal authorities. He was charged after authorities discovered an unregistered suppressor, also known as a silencer.
The dealer, George Peterson, filed motions to dismiss the case and/or suppress the evidence gathered, arguing the law to register suppressors violated gun owners’ Second Amendment rights. A federal judge in 2023 denied the motions, finding the law constitutional on the grounds that suppressors are merely accessories, not arms, so are not protected by the amendment.
Peterson in his appeal to the Fifth Circuit said that suppressors are “an integral part of a firearm” in urging the court to overturn the lower court ruling because they’re used to “‘cast … or strike’ a bullet at another person.”
“Silencers receive the explicit protection of the Second Amendment because they constitute ‘arms’ (or accessories to arms),” he said through his lawyers. “And even if they did not, silencers would still fall within the scope of the Second Amendment’s implicit guarantee because their use is indispensable to exercise of the core second Amendment right, i.e., the use of a gun for self- defense in the home.”
They pointed to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling called Heller that found the arms referenced in the Second Amendment referred to “weapons of offence, or armour of defence.”
Judges on the appeals court disagreed.
