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I think Gorsuch is a kind of hyper-textualist (sometimes to the exclusion of other indications of original public meaning), and the difference between his positions here and in Bostock can mostly be chalked up to the fact that Title VII and the Equal Protection Clause do not, in fact, say the same thing. Title VII is explicitly broader than the Equal Protection Clause in a way that Gorauxh finds dispositive.
I think he was wrong on Bostock to ignore the fact that literally no one thought Title VII had anything to say on the trans issue when it was enacted, but it's a legitimate opinion that other good-faith conservatives and libertarians I know agree with. And Gorsuch hasn't generally shown himself to be a beltway clout-chaser in my opinion. Certainly nothing like Roberts or Kavanaugh. If anything, he has an almost autistic tendency to stick to his guns when he's saying something unpopular.
I'd like to believe that, but Gorsuch wrote Vanderstok: solely a textual interpretation of statute, very well-documented and very clear law, also a complete duck because it'd be unpopular.
I actually think Vanderstok is an example of the same phenomenon. From Gorsuch's perspective, the GCA's definition of "firearm" may be absurdly broad, but that's not his fault. Democracy is the theory that the people know what they want and deserve to get it, good and hard, and all that. Just as in Bostock, the context the words of the statute were written are irrelevant to his analysis.
Maybe I'm insufficiently cynical, but I just don't get the same sense of insincerity from Gorsuch as I get from someone like Roberts. Then again, I don't think Gorsuch is much of a gun guy, so I can't completely rule out that he's just conforming to his peers' opinion that "ghost guns" are scary tools of insurrection undeserving of constitutional protection. He could just be an old school "I don't know why my old hunting rifle isn't good enough for the kids these days" NRA types.
I agree he's more sincere than John "Article III is <Not> Worth a Dollar" Roberts, fair. But I don't see any way to make VanDerStok workable in the same frame as Bostock.
Trivially, VanDerStok isn't clearly saying that the GCA definition of "firearm" is massively broad; that's why it has to keep wavering back and forth from ordinary meaning to what Congress 'meant' to say whenever discussing "artifact nouns". That's very far from Bostock's explicit division from what Congress intended to say from what the statute actually spells out.
But more critically, VanDerStok is a dodge. Gorsuch does not write to say that the GCA definition of "firearm" is so broad as to even cover all of the plaintiffs. He discovers that APA challenges must act as a facial challenge such that no enforcement of the regulation could ever be a valid interpretation of the statute, after the plaintiffs never argued it and the government defending the law disavowed. Even were he absolutely sure that the ghost guns rule were perfectly in line with the statute, he's not actually committing to it, either.
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