The Supreme Court ruled 6- 3 on Friday to reject a Trump- time policy banning bump stocks for semi- automated weapon, arguing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive ( ATF ) exceeded its power.
The Trump government’s ATF created the rules 14 months after the deadliest U. S. mass shooting took place in 2017 at a country music festival in Las Vegas. A previous ATF rule that stated a semi-automatic rifle with a nudge share does not count as a fully automated firearm or machine gun was overturned in this regulation. The Trump administration, alongside people, argued nudge companies “illegally convert semi- automatic rifles … into totally automated system guns”, The Federalist’s founder Sean Davis explained.
Anyone who owned bump stocks had 90 days to destroy them or give them to the government as a result of what Davis described as” the most comprehensive federal gun control effort since the so-called assault weapons ban, which was passed in 1994 and expired in 2003,” Davis wrote.
Justice Clarence Thomas served as the majority’s writer for the majority, and the high court reversed the rule.
Michael Cargill, who was forced to turn over two bump stocks after the ban became effective, claimed that the ATF lacked the statutory authority to create the rule because bump stocks are not “machineguns” under federal law. Since then, the Supreme Court has ruled that the ATF lacked the authority to develop the rule. Similar decisions were made by a Court of Appeals before the Supreme Court was given the opportunity to hear the case.
The Court first reaffirmed that a bump stock “does not alter the basic mechanics of bump firing, and the trigger still needs to be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot,” thus not infringing the 1934 National Firearms Act definition of a “machinegun.”
In this case, the question is whether a bump stock, which is a semi-automatic rifle accessory that makes the shooter quickly reengage the trigger and achieve a high rate of fire. We hold that it does not and therefore affirm”, the Court ruled.
The current federal definition for a “machinegun” states, in part:
” Any weapon that shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
According to the Supreme Court, adding a bump stock does not make a semi-automatic firearm into a machinegun under current law because “it cannot fire more than one shot’ by a single trigger, and even if it could, it would not do so’automatically.”
Nothing alters a semiautomatic rifle’s ability to have a bump stock, the Court observed. The shooter must release the trigger’s pressure and allow it to reset before reengaging the trigger for a subsequent shot. A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time between distinct “functions” of the trigger.
Additionally, the court rejected the ATF’s claim that a bump stock allows a person to fire multiple shots with one pull of the trigger.
The ruling rests on the false assumption that there is a difference between the shooter pressing the trigger while pushing the weapon forward to bump the trigger against his stationary trigger.” At the same time, ATF’s position is logically inconsistent because its reasoning would also lead to a semiautomatic rifle being able to fire more than one shot by a” single function of the trigger,” the ruling states. Yet, ATF agrees that is not the case. ATF’s argument is thus at odds with itself”.
The Court cited an ATF rule from 2017 that stated that “forward pressure must be applied with the support hand to the forward handguard [and ] to fire each shot, each subsequent shot fir]es ] with a single trigger function.”
Thomas also criticized the minority’s dissention for trying to “rewrite” text in response to what they believe Congress may have done when the law was first passed.
” Congress could have linked the definition of’ machinegun’ to a weapon’s rate of fire, as the dissent would prefer. But, it instead enacted a statute that turns on whether a weapon can fire more than one shot’ automatically… by a single function of the trigger.’ And,’ it is never our job to rewrite… statutory text under the banner of speculation about what Congress might have done.'”
Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative, wrote a concurring opinion, but left the door open for Congress to “act” and outlaw bump stocks. The Las Vegas shooting, Alito wrote, showed that” a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machinegun, and it thus strengthened the case for amending]federal law]. However, a situation that makes a law necessary does not automatically alter its meaning.
Notably, the decision does not consider whether the ATF’s procedure for banning the accessory was legitimate enough to justify a Congressional ban on bump stocks.
The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman is a correspondent for elections.
