On September 10, 2026, Judge Maryellen Noreika of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware issued a summary-judgment ruling in Rigby v. Jennings that strikes down the enforcement core of Delaware’s ghost-gun statute, House Bill 125, while leaving another piece of it standing. The court held that Delaware cannot ban the possession of unserialized firearms or the self-manufacture of untraceable ones, including manufacture by 3D printer, because the Second Amendment protects a citizen’s right to make his own arms without first registering them with the government. It is not a total defeat for Delaware, and I want to be precise about that, because a ruling that gets overstated stops being useful to the people who need to rely on it.
A Split Decision, Not a Clean Sweep
Judge Noreika framed the case herself in terms I will use rather than my own: “This case asks how the current First and Second Amendment analytical landscapes apply to Delaware’s attempts to ban ghost guns. Like the outcomes of many constitutional inquiries, the results here are mixed: some of Delaware’s proposed measures are constitutional, others are not.” What fell was Delaware’s ban on possessing an unserialized frame or receiver and its ban on self-manufacturing an untraceable firearm, including by 3D printer. What survived was Delaware’s ban on commercially selling or distributing untraceable firearms, and, separately, its ban on distributing the computer files used to print one. A citizen making a firearm for his own use is protected. A dealer selling untraceable firearms, or anyone handing out the code to make one, is not. That line is the whole opinion.
The Right to Make What You May Lawfully Own
The court’s reasoning starts with a proposition I have pressed for a long time: an unserialized firearm is still a firearm. “An untraceable firearm is an Arm under the Second Amendment,” Judge Noreika wrote. “It is, after all, a firearm, and even under the narrowest reading of ‘Arms,’ ‘all firearms constitute[] “arms,”’ whether serialized or not.” From there the court reasoned that the right to keep and bear arms presupposes a right to acquire one, and there are only two lawful ways to do that. “Based on this record it appears there are two ways to acquire firearms: self-manufacture or acquisition of a firearm manufactured by someone else,” the opinion states. “The Manufacturing and Assembly Ban cuts off one avenue of acquiring firearms (self-manufacturing), and thus places restrictions on conduct protected by the Second Amendment.” Once a law burdens conduct the text covers, Heller and Bruen shift the burden to the government to prove a historical tradition of that exact regulation.
Delaware’s Missing History
Delaware could not carry that burden. It offered three categories of old laws: nineteenth- and twentieth-century restrictions on clubs, knives, and slungshots; laws governing trap, punt, pivot, and swivel guns; and gunpowder-storage statutes. The court rejected all three. The weapons laws, it held, came from the wrong century — “too late in time” to establish a Founding-era tradition. The gunpowder laws failed for a different reason entirely: they were fire-safety measures, enacted, as the opinion put it, from “fear of the devastating effects of fires and explosions,” not efforts to track who owned what. Neither category answers the question Delaware needed to answer: where is the historical tradition of forcing a private citizen to register a firearm he built for himself, with no intent to sell it? There is none, and the absence of one is precisely what the Second Amendment’s history-and-tradition test is built to expose.
Brick by Brick: A New Jersey Win Built This One
The analogues Delaware needed and could not find were not created for this case. They came from the Third Circuit’s en banc decision in Ass’n of New Jersey Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Attorney General of New Jersey, 183 F.4th 211 (3d Cir. 2026), the ruling that struck New Jersey’s assault-weapon and magazine bans this past July. Judge Noreika drew her “too late in time” analysis directly from that opinion, binding precedent in the circuit that includes Delaware. On the piece of HB 125 that survived, the CAD-file distribution ban, the court leaned on a companion Third Circuit decision, Defense Distributed v. Attorney General of New Jersey, 167 F.4th 65 (3d Cir. 2026), which had already rejected a First Amendment challenge to an identical New Jersey restriction. This is the pattern I keep pointing to: a win in one state’s case becomes the precedent that decides a case in a different state months later. Neither side gets to choose which bricks stack on which wall.
A Different Fight Than the Frame-Receiver Cases
Do not confuse this with the federal frame-receiver litigation I have written about elsewhere, where the question is whether an ATF regulation properly classifies unfinished frames as firearms under federal law. Rigby is a state statute and a state traceability scheme, decided entirely on Second Amendment grounds against Delaware Attorney General Kathy Jennings. Judge Noreika, appointed to the bench by President Trump in 2018, has now handed the self-manufacture movement its clearest state-law win yet, even as she left Delaware’s commercial-sale restrictions intact. An appeal to the Third Circuit is the likely next step, and given that circuit’s recent record, Delaware should not assume the rest of HB 125 survives much longer either.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.