Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday invalidated a federal rule issued during the Trump administration that banned bump stocks, devices that significantly increase the rate of fire of semi-automatic weapons.
The 6-3 ruling shows that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority when it issued the ban in 2018, after the Mass shooting in 2017 at a music festival in Las Vegas, the deadliest in American history. Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the opinion of the court, which was divided along ideological lines. Judge Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench
“This case asks whether a bump stock – an accessory to a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to quickly pull the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire) – turns the rifle into a ‘machine gun’. We believe that this is not the case,” Thomas wrote for the conservative majority.
Rick Bowmer/AP
The court’s ruling reverses one of the few actions the federal government has taken in recent years to combat gun violence, as Republicans in Congress have resisted comprehensive gun restrictions. The case did not involve the Second Amendment, but was one of several before the justices this term involving federal regulatory power.
Bumpstocks are attachments that increase the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles to hundreds of rounds per minute. The case, known as Garland v. Cargill, focused on whether the ATF went too far in doing so banned the devices in 2018 after it was determined that the definition of a “machine gun” in a 1934 law included bump stocks. Machine guns allow multiple rounds to be fired with a single pull of the trigger and are prohibited by federal law.
ATF had repeatedly determined that stocks would rise between 2008 and 2017 do not qualify as machine guns and were not regulated by relevant legislation. But the agency changed its position after the 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Musical Festival, in which a gunman killed 58 people and injured another 500, after which Congress took no action to regulate the devices.
The gunman used semi-automatic weapons equipped with bump stocks, which allowed him to fire up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition in 11 minutes, according to the FBI.
The bump stock ban
Published in December 2018, the new rule that a rifle equipped with a bump stock qualifies as a machine gun in part because when a shooter pulls the trigger, it initiates a firing sequence that produces more than one shot. That firing sequence is “automatic” because “the device utilizes the firearm’s recoil energy as part of a continuous back-and-forth cycle allowing the shooter to fire continuously after a single pull of the trigger.”
Bump stocks replace the standard stock of a semi-automatic rifle and allow the rest of the weapon to move back and forth while the stock remains in place. When the rifle is fired and the shooter applies forward pressure to the barrel, the rifle recoils in the stock and bounces forward again, “bumping” the trigger into the shooter’s finger and firing another round.
The Trump administration’s rule went into effect in March 2019. Those who already possessed bump stocks were required to destroy the devices or hand them over to the ATF or face criminal penalties.
During the agency’s regulatory process, Michael Cargill purchased two bump stocks. After the ban was issued, he turned the devices over to ATF and filed a lawsuit against the government in federal court in Texas.
A U.S. District Court and a three-judge panel of appellate courts ruled in favor of the ATF, but the full bench of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit invalidated the ban on bump stocks.
Cargill’s case was not the only challenge to the regulation. Another bump stock owner prevailed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, but a three-judge panel on the Washington, D.C., appeals court upheld the ban after finding that a bump stock is a machine gun under the federal law.
The Biden administration backed the ban on bump stocks and urged the Supreme Court to leave the policy unchanged. Guns equipped with these devices are “dangerous and unusual weapons,” Justice Department lawyers argued, saying bump stocks allow them to circumvent the ban on machine guns that was introduced in 1986.
