On a vote of 6-3, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday shot down a ban on bump stocks, which are gun attachments that make a semiautomatic weapon perform more like an automatic weapon, but with a key difference, which the court majority pointed out in its ruling.
The bump stock ban was put in place during the Trump Administration by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2018, following a mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas, in which the weapon used was enhanced by a bump stock attachment. Sixty people died and over 500 were injured, leading the AT to decide that the weapon was modified into a machine gun, which is banned or civilian use by Congress.
The decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, said that ATF made an error of definition when it decided a federal ban on machine guns to include bump stocks.
The argument made by the plaintiffs was not a constitutional challenge based on the Second Amendment’s guarantee of the right to bear arms, but rather because of the ATF’s misunderstanding of how guns work.
The law defines a machine gun as any weapon that can fire more than one shot automatically and “by a single function of the trigger.”
Justice Thomas wrote that semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump stocks do not fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.” Instead, the shooter must release pressure from the trigger and “allow it to reset before reengaging the trigger or another shot.
The bump stock reduces the time it takes by allowing the trigger to reset quickly and even if a semiautomatic rifle that is equipped with a bump stock fires more than one shot by a single pull of the trigger, it will not do so automatically, as the law clearly states. A shooter who wants to fire multiple shots using a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock, “must also actively maintain just the right amount of forward pressure on the rifle’s front grip with his trigger hand,” Thomas wrote.
Justice Samuel Alito concurred in a written opinion, and said that although he could understand the intent, the court must follow the law set by Congress on automatic weapons. If Congress wants the law changed, it needs to revise the statute.
“The final rule clarifies that the definition of ‘machinegun’ in the Gun Control Act (GCA) and National Firearms Act (NFA) includes bump-stock-type devices, i.e., devices that allow a semiautomatic firearm to shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm to which it is affixed so that the trigger resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter,” the explanation reads at the ATFf website.
Those who owned bump stocks were required to turn them in or destroy them.
“Current possessors of bump-stock-type devices must divest themselves of possession as of the effective date of the final rule (March 26, 2019),” ATF wrote. “One option is to destroy the device, and the final rule identifies possible methods of destruction, to include completely melting, shredding, or crushing the device. Any method of destruction must render the device incapable of being readily restored to function.”
All owners of gun stocks who ended up having to turn them in or destroy them were financially harmed by the rule that has now been reversed by the high court.
Read the ATF rule at this link.
Dissenting were the three liberal women of the court: Justices Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote the dissenting opinion that warned of “deadly consequences.”
