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The Supreme Court has lifted a ban on bump stock devices.
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The devices allow guns to fire rapid bullets and were used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.
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Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Congress would agree to a ban, but struck down the ban anyway.
There is “little doubt,” Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote, that Congress would have considered bump stocks a machine gun.
The devices – which allow semi-automatic rifles to fire bullets at a speed almost comparable to machine guns – were banned by federal authorities in 2018 after the Las Vegas shooter used them to kill 60 people and injure more than 400.
But Alito and the other conservative justices still decided to strike down the ban, saying the text of Congress’s definition of machine guns — on which the ban was based — was not explicit enough.
“The text of the law is clear, and we must follow it,” the textualist judge wrote.
The Supreme Court on Friday struck down the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) rule that classified bump stocks as “machine guns.”
The devices use a gun’s recoil to reactivate the trigger more quickly, allowing weapons to be fired at more than 800 rounds per minute.
The ATF had previously allowed the devices but reclassified them during the Trump administration after the Oct. 1, 2017 shooting massacre, in which the gunman shot at concertgoers from a nearby hotel.
But Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner from Austin, Texas, sued the federal government. He argued that the firearms law had been interpreted too broadly and that Congress had never explicitly intended to ban bump stocks, challenging the law on legal grounds, not Second Amendment protections.
In their ruling on Friday, the court’s conservative justices agreed.
Writing for the majority opinion, Judge Clarence Thomas said the bump stock could not be considered a machine gun because it fires no more than one round per trigger pull – it speeds up the number of times the trigger is pulled.
“A bump stock doesn’t turn a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does,” Thomas wrote.
Alito said, in his contemporaneous opinion, that the “terrible shooting” in Las Vegas proved that a bump stock could cause the same kind of carnage as a machine gun.
But Alito said Congress should make it explicit that it also wants to ban bump stocks, by changing the law or passing a new law.
“Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act,” Alito said.
In a dissent echoed by the court’s other liberal members, Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the decision as “artificially narrow” and warned it will have “deadly consequences.”
“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” she wrote.
Read the original article on Business Insider
