CNN
—
The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a federal ban on bump stocks approved by former President Donald Trump, the court’s latest step to limit the power of federal agencies to act independently.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion for the court, which voted 6-3. The court’s liberal wing, led by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented.
President Trump had pushed for the ban following the 2017 mass shooting at an outdoor music festival in Las Vegas that left 58 people dead. Bump stocks allow semi-automatic rifles to be modified to turn them into weapons capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute.
“Bump stocks cannot turn a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with lightning-fast trigger pulls can,” Thomas wrote in the opinion. “Even with bump stocks, a semi-automatic rifle can only fire one shot per ‘trigger function.'”
The ban was challenged by Texas gun store owner Michael Cargill, who bought two of the weapons in 2018, turned them over to the government after the ban took effect, and then sued soon after for their return. Federal regulations make possession of bump stocks a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Although the case did not rely on the Second Amendment, it put the gun debate back on the court’s docket as one of the most closely watched issues this year, and as such, the decision marked the latest time the Supreme Court has sided with gun rights groups.
In a scathing dissent joined by the court’s two other liberal justices, Justice Sotomayor said the majority’s decision “would have deadly consequences.”
She wrote that the decision “hampers the government’s efforts to keep machine guns away from shooters like the Las Vegas shooter.”
Underscoring her dissatisfaction with the ruling, Justice Sotomayor took the unusual step of reading a dissenting opinion from the court on Friday.
“If 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 wrote in her dissent. “A semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock ‘automatically fires multiple shots with a single pull of the trigger, without the need for manual reloading.’ I call it a machine gun, as does Congress, and so I respectfully dissent.”
03:04 – Source: CNN
A survivor of the Sandy Hook shooting just graduated. How much have US gun laws changed since then?
The bump stock challenge is indirectly tied to gun control laws enacted by Congress in the 1930s that were intended to target gangsters like Al Capone and John Dillinger. In response to the brutal crimes of machine guns being used to rob banks and ambush police, lawmakers required gun owners to register their weapons.
The law was amended several times, and by 1986 it completely banned Americans from transferring or owning machine guns under most circumstances. Importantly, the amendment defined a “machine gun” as “a weapon that fires one or more shots with a single pull of the trigger.” What exactly this term meant was the focus of the appeal.
The Trump and Biden administrations, as well as gun control groups, have argued that the bump stock makes the gun a machine gun, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reclassified it as a machine gun in 2018, making it illegal to buy or own under previous law.
At the time, Trump described bump stocks as “turning a legal weapon into an illegal machine.”
The ATF estimates that as many as 520,000 bump stocks were sold between 2010 and 2018. The devices replace a regular stock on a semi-automatic rifle. By holding the trigger finger in place, a shooter can use the recoil of the gun to mimic automatic fire.
Opponents argue that the ATF overstepped its authority by reclassifying the devices, and they point out that the agency has long said the devices were exempt from the law, under both Democratic and Republican administrations.
A federal district court in Texas and a three-judge panel on the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the Justice Department, but the full 5th Circuit rehearsed the case and issued a split opinion last year siding with Cargill.
The Supreme Court appeared divided during oral arguments in late February, with several conservative members of the court particularly concerned by the idea that Americans who buy bump stocks, even though they are not classified as machine guns, could suddenly be charged with a crime they did not know about.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh worried that criminalizing the devices would “entrap” Americans.
“You can be convicted even if you don’t know what the law prohibits,” Kavanaugh told lawyers representing the Biden administration. “It will ensnare a lot of people who don’t know what the law prohibits.”
Another central theme of the debate was whether Congress, rather than the ATF, should have approved the ban, a topic that has emerged as a central theme at the Supreme Court in recent years, with groups challenging financial and environmental regulations in separate cases.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with some gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, in opposing bump stock bans. Most recently, the court’s conservative majority struck down a New York state law that required special requirements for residents to carry weapons outside their homes.
Justice Thomas’ opinion reflected the technical nature of the case and oral argument in February, and delved into the mechanics of semi-automatic rifles, including a series of diagrams showing what happens when the trigger is pulled.
“A bump-stocked semi-automatic rifle requires more than one pull of the trigger to fire multiple rounds,” Thomas wrote, emphasizing the idea that the device is different from an automatic rifle, where the shooter simply pulls the trigger.
“If too much forward pressure is applied, the rifle will not slide back far enough to release and reset the trigger, and the rifle will not be able to fire another shot. If too little pressure is applied, the trigger will not meet the shooter’s trigger finger with enough force to fire another shot,” Thomas wrote. “Without this continuous manual input, a semi-automatic rifle with a bump stock cannot fire multiple shots. So to fire multiple shots, the trigger must be pulled once — and then several more times.”
This story has been updated with additional details.
