By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declared illegal a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that allow semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns. It has once again rejected a gun restriction — this time one enacted under Republican former President Donald Trump.
The justices, in a 6-3 ruling written by conservative Judge Clarence Thomas, upheld the decision of a lower court that sided with Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban by claiming that a U.S. agency improperly interpreted a federal law banning machine guns as an expansion of stocks. The conservative justices were in the majority, while the liberal justices disagreed.
The rule was imposed by the Trump administration in 2019 after the devices were used during a 2017 mass shooting that killed 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas.
Democratic President Joe Biden, whose administration defended the rule in court, said the decision “removes an important gun safety rule.”
“Americans should not have to live in fear of this massive devastation,” Biden added, saying he has “used every tool in my administration to eradicate gun violence.”
“I’m calling on Congress to ban stockpiles, pass an assault weapons ban and take additional action to save lives – send me a bill and I will sign it immediately,” Biden said.
Trump is challenging Biden in the November 5 US elections. Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said after the ruling, “The court has spoken and their decision must be respected,” calling him a “fierce defender” of gun rights.
The case centered on how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, interpreted a federal law called the National Firearms Act, which defined machine guns as weapons that fire “automatically” can fire more than one weapon. shot “by a single function of the trigger.”
“We believe that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,'” Thomas wrote. “And even if it could, it wouldn’t do it ‘automatically’. ATF therefore exceeded its legal authority by issuing a rule classifying bump stocks as machine guns.
Federal law prohibits the sale or possession of machine guns, which is punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Bump stocks use the recoil of a semi-automatic to slide it back and forth while “bumping” against the shooter’s trigger finger, resulting in rapid fire. Federal officials had said the rule was necessary to protect public safety in a country experiencing persistent gun violence.
‘WALKS LIKE A DUCK’
In dissent, liberal Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the ruling would have “deadly consequences,” saying the court’s majority overruled Congress’s will to embrace an “artificially narrow definition” of a machine gun, allowing gun users and manufacturers to break the law bypass.
Sotomayor noted that the court majority accomplished this by focusing heavily on the internal mechanisms of the firearm and using “six diagrams and an animation” to reach a conclusion when bump stock-equipped firearms are clearly machine guns , Sotomayor said.
“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,” Sotomayor added.
After a gunman used weapons equipped with bump stocks in the Las Vegas shooting that killed 58 people and injured hundreds of others, the Trump administration banned the devices. In a reversal of the agency’s previous position, the ATF decided that bump stocks were covered by the National Firearms Act.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote in a unanimous opinion on Friday: “The terrible shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 did not change the statutory text or its meaning. That event demonstrated that a semi-automatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun, and thus strengthened the case for changing the existing law,” Alito said.
“Now that the situation is clear, Congress can take action,” Alito added.
EXTENDED VIEW OF GUN RIGHTS
The Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, has taken a broad stance on gun rights, striking down gun restrictions in major cases in 2008, 2010 and in 2022. In that 2022 decision, it struck down New York State’s restrictions on carrying concealed handguns outside the home and set a strict new standard for determining the legality of gun regulations. Unlike these three cases, this one did not focus on the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Mark Chenoweth, president of the conservative legal group New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented Cargill, applauded the ruling.
“The statute that Congress passed did not ban bump stocks, and ATF does not have the power to do so on its own,” Chenoweth said.
John Feinblatt, president of the gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, urged Congress to ban bump stocks.
“Guns equipped with bump stocks fire like machine guns, they kill like machine guns, and they should be banned like machine guns – but the Supreme Court just decided to put these deadly devices back on the market,” Feinblatt said.
The New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Cargill last year.
The United States is a country deeply divided over its approach to gun violence, which Biden has called a “national shame.” Biden and many Democrats support stricter gun restrictions, while Republicans often oppose them. In this case, it was a Republican administration that implemented the rule.
The judges are also expected to rule in a new gun rights case at the end of June. They heard arguments in November about the legality of a federal law that makes it a crime for people who are victims of domestic violence to have guns.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York and John Kruzel in Washington; additional reporting by Nathan Layne; Editing by Will Dunham)
