WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has lifted a ban on bump stocks, the gun accessory used in the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history — a massacre in Las Vegas that killed 60 people and injured hundreds more.
The court’s conservative majority said Friday that then-President Donald Trump’s administration overstepped its authority with the 2019 gun ban, which allows semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns.
Here’s what you need to know about the case:
What are bump stocks?
Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s butt, the part that presses against the shooter’s shoulder. When a person fires a semiautomatic weapon equipped with a bump stock, it uses the gun’s recoil energy to quickly and repeatedly bump the trigger against the shooter’s finger.
This allows the weapon to fire dozens of bullets in a matter of seconds.
Bump stocks were invented in the early 2000s following the passage of a 1994 ban on assault weapons. The federal government approved the sale of bump stocks in 2010 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concluded that guns equipped with these devices should not be considered illegal machine guns under federal law.
According to court documents, there were more than 520,000 bump stocks in circulation by the time the government changed course and imposed a ban that took effect in 2019.
Why were bump stocks banned?
More than 22,000 people were attending a country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, when a man opened fire on the crowd from the window of his high-rise hotel room. He fired more than a thousand bullets into the crowd in eleven minutes, killing sixty people and wounding hundreds more.
Authorities found an arsenal of 23 assault rifles in the gunman’s hotel room, including 14 weapons equipped with bump stocks.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the ATF reconsidered whether bump stocks could be legally sold and repossessed. With support from Trump, a Republican, the agency ordered a ban on the devices in 2018, arguing they turned rifles into illegal machine guns.
Owners of Bump shares were given until March 2019 to surrender or destroy them.
What did the judges say?
The 6-3 majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, said the ATF did not have the authority to issue the regulation banning bump stocks. The judges said a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun because the weapon does not fire more than one shot with a single trigger pull.
Justice Samuel Alito, joining the majority, wrote in a separate opinion that the Las Vegas shooting strengthened the case for a change in the law to ban bump stocks such as machine guns. But that must happen through congressional action, not regulation, he wrote.
The court’s three liberal judges opposed the ruling. Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that there is no common sense difference between a machine gun and a semiautomatic firearm with a bump stock.
“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.
Are there states that have their own bans?
At least 15 states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump stocks, although some could be affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
However, most state laws remain in effect because the decision concerned the ATF rule and not the constitutionality of state-level bans, said David Pucino, legal director of the gun control think tank Giffords.
Who challenged the ban?
A group called the New Civil Liberties Alliance has filed a lawsuit on behalf of Michael Cargill, a gun store owner in Texas, challenging the bump stock ban. Cargill bought two bump stocks in 2018 and then surrendered them once the federal ban took effect, court documents show.
The case did not directly address gun owners’ Second Amendment rights. Instead, Cargill’s lawyers argued that the ATF had exceeded its authority by banning bump stocks. Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, said his group would not have filed a lawsuit if Congress had banned them by law.
How did the case end up at the Supreme Court?
The Supreme Court took up the case after lower federal courts issued conflicting rulings on whether the ATF could ban bump stocks.
The ban survived challenges before the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Denver-based 10th Circuit and the federal circuit court in Washington.
But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, struck down the ban on bump stocks last year when it ruled in the Texas case. The court’s majority in the 13-3 decision found that “a plain reading of the statutory language” showed that weapons equipped with bump stocks could not be regulated as machine guns.
