Firearms Policy Coalition asked a Delaware federal judge to reject the state’s push to revive its unfinished-frame ban after a September ruling struck it down as unconstitutional.
The Daily Caller reported that the Firearms Policy Coalition filed a brief Thursday urging U.S. District Judge Maryellen Noreika to deny Delaware’s request to revisit her September decision. That ruling held the state’s ban on incomplete frames or receivers violated the Second Amendment.
Noreika, a Trump appointee sitting in the District of Delaware, found that unfinished frames and receivers still count as “Arms” protected by the Constitution. Delaware’s Democratic Attorney General Kathy Jennings responded in October with a motion claiming the court committed clear error and should alter the judgment.
FPC told the court the case is not moot and that Delaware’s later statutory tweak did not fix the constitutional problems. Plaintiffs named in the briefing, Rigby and Knight, already gave up firearms and components and cannot simply get them back under the state’s limited safe-harbor language.
In her September opinion, Noreika rejected the idea that incomplete frames sit outside the Second Amendment. She tied her holding to federal definitions and circuit precedent.
Noreika wrote:
“Firearm frames and receivers are likewise ‘Arms’ under the Second Amendment.”
She went further on the functional point:
“To start, under federal law, the term ‘firearm’ includes [] ‘the frame or receiver’ of any gun. That indicates that unfinished frames and receivers are not functionally different from firearms and enjoy the same Second Amendment protections. Moreover, a frame or receiver is ‘necessary for [] a gun to function as intended,’ so in this Circuit, a frame or receiver constitutes an ‘Arm’ under the Second Amendment.”
That language put Delaware’s incomplete-frame restrictions on the wrong side of the constitutional text. The state then sought a do-over rather than live with the loss.
Jennings’ October filing argued the judge erred by treating firearm manufacture as protected under the plain text of the Second Amendment. Even if self-manufacture were protected, the state said, its serialization rules impose only an incidental burden that survives the first step of the Supreme Court’s Bruen test.
Jennings told the court:
“The Court committed clear error by finding the manufacture of firearms is protected by plain text of the Second Amendment. Even if a right to self-manufacture firearms were protected by the Second Amendment, the serialization requirement that the Enjoined Statutes place on all firearms, whether self-manufactured or not, represents at most an incidental burden that is constitutional at step one of Bruen.”
In short, Delaware wants the injunction lifted or narrowed so it can keep forcing serialization and related limits on unfinished parts. FPC answered that the amendment did not create a real safe harbor for people who build their own firearms, and the possession carve-out only covers guns owned before the statute took effect.
The coalition’s opposition brief pressed several points at once. First, the case is still live. Second, the statutory change left self-manufactured firearms without a workable safe harbor. Third, the limited possession language does not let the named plaintiffs reclaim what they already surrendered.
FPC stated:
“The case is not moot because the statutory amendment did not cure the constitutional defects. There is no safe harbor for self-manufactured firearms, and the safe harbor for possession is limited to firearms possessed before the statute’s effective date.”
The group added that the plain text of that safe harbor “does not allow Plaintiffs Rigby and Knight to reacquire the firearms and components that they have already relinquished.” On the equities, FPC argued that loss of constitutionally protected rights is irreparable harm and that the public has no legitimate interest in seeing an unconstitutional law enforced.
FPC put it this way:
“The deprivation of Plaintiffs’ constitutionally protected rights, including their right to self-manufacture, constitutes irreparable injury, and there is no public interest in enforcing unconstitutional laws.”
On the same day the brief landed, the coalition posted a blunt release on X: after losing in federal court, Delaware was trying to “resurrect its unconstitutional bans on self-manufactured firearms by pretending they’re something else.”
The Delaware fight is not happening in a vacuum. On Aug. 17, Chief U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas ruled for Defense Distributed and held that the ATF’s “frame or receiver rule” was unconstitutional on both Fifth Amendment and Second Amendment grounds. O’Connor is a George W. Bush appointee.
Four days later, on Aug. 21, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit dismissed a lawsuit brought by Democratic California Attorney General Rob Bonta and the Giffords Law Center against the ATF. The panel found the plaintiffs lacked standing to demand tighter federal controls on so-called ghost guns.
Those decisions cut against the broader push to treat unfinished frames as easy regulatory targets. At the same time, the Supreme Court in 2025 upheld certain Biden administration regulations in a 7-2 vote. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh joined the three liberal justices. The Court treated those rules as analogous to some First Amendment restrictions. That earlier win for the federal government has not stopped lower courts from scrutinizing state and agency frame rules under Bruen and the Second Amendment’s plain text.
Delaware’s latest motion tries to reframe the case around serialization rather than an outright ban. Jennings calls the requirement an “incidental burden.” FPC answers that the constitutional defects remain, that self-manufacture still lacks protection under the amended statute, and that plaintiffs who already complied by surrendering parts are locked out of any reacquisition path.
Judge Noreika now has both the state’s motion to alter the judgment and the coalition’s opposition. The September opinion already treated frames and receivers as arms necessary for a firearm to work as intended. Delaware wants that holding walked back. FPC wants the injunction left in place and the reconsideration bid denied.
When states lose on the Second Amendment and then rewrite the statute just enough to claim the case went away, courts should look past the paperwork shuffle and keep the constitutional ruling intact.
