Kits for building your own firearm did not contain serial numbers. You didn’t have to get a background check or anything. That was the problem in a lot of people’s minds.

So, the Biden administration directed the ATF to ban them.

During the arguments before the Supreme Court in the case challenging this ban, there were a number of comments that came up. I already addressed one that bothered me, but other people had other issues. For example, a group of linguists offered the absolutely dumbest take I’ve seen yet on the case.

VanDerStok tees up a question of linguistics: Do these gun-making kits fall within the meaning of the word “firearm” in the Gun Control Act of 1968? The justices will interpret the law under the framework of “textualism” — the philosophy that legal disputes should be resolved by considering what ordinary speakers of English would understand the text of the law to mean.

The gun industry representatives challenging the regulation argue that the word “firearm” excludes gun parts kits. As scholars of linguistics, we find this unpersuasive. 

The word “firearm” denotes a class of human-created objects; it is what linguists call an artifact noun. As Justice Neil Gorsuch’s oral argument questions clarified, artifact nouns often refer to things that function only upon additional assembly or finishing with additional tools. 

Justice Samuel Alito asked, skeptically, whether separate eggs, chopped ham and pepper constitute an “omelet.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett proposed a tighter analogy to the gun part kits at issue: “Would your answer change if you ordered it from HelloFresh?” 

We would understand that kit to be an omelet — just as a gun parts kit, designed and readily convertible to become a functioning firearm, is a firearm. The justices discussed other examples, such as an IKEA table (which we understand to be a table, even when unassembled).

Now, here’s why this is idiotic: Mirriam-Webster defines a table as “a piece of furniture consisting of a smooth flat slab fixed on legs.” It defines an omelet as “beaten eggs cooked without stirring until set and served folded in half.”

With me so far?

So how is a collection of Ikea parts a table when the slab isn’t fixed on legs? How is it an omelet when the eggs aren’t beaten and cooked?

A thing isn’t just a collection of parts. It’s those parts assembled in a particular way.

What’s disturbing to me, though, is that many of the people taking this position would argue that a human zygote isn’t a person even though it will become one through no actions of anyone else save those necessary to just keep it and the host (the mother) alive. It’s not a person but a collection of cells, they tell us.

But through absolutely no direct action, that will become a person.

Meanwhile, we have these linguists trying to tell us that some eggs, cheese, and ham are really an omelet already. If I eat the uncooked eggs, I might well get Salmonella, but since it’s already an omelet, that shouldn’t be possible.

I might be able to sit my drink on an unassembled Ikea table, but it won’t be at a comfortable height for retrieval unless I set the unassembled table on one that has the legs already fixed to it.

Likewise, a parts kit isn’t a gun until it is turned into one.

I don’t care what it might mean linguistically simply because the Constitution wasn’t written for linguists to interpret for us. That’s especially true when this is the argument they concoct to defend idiocy.