The US Supreme Court ruled in favour of a challenge to a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns, dealing a setback to yet another firearms restriction – this time one enacted under Republican former President Donald Trump.
The justices, in a six-three ruling, upheld a lower court’s decision siding with Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban by claiming that a US agency improperly interpreted a federal law banning machine guns as extending to bump stocks.
The conservative justices were in the majority and the liberal justices in dissent.
The rule was imposed after the devices were used during a 2017 mass shooting that killed 58 people at a Las Vegas country music festival.
“This case asks whether a bump stock – an accessory for a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire) – converts the rifle into a ‘machine gun’. We hold that it does not and therefore affirm” the lower court’s ruling, conservative Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the decision.
Though the Supreme Court affirmed Mr Cargill’s victory in his lawsuit, US District Judge David Ezra previously rebuffed the plaintiff’s effort to block the ban nationwide.
The judge, however, left open the door to reconsidering following a ruling by the Supreme Court.
Federal officials have said the rule was needed to protect public safety in the United States, a nation facing persistent firearms violence.
The ban was put in place in 2019 during Mr Trump’s administration and was defended by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration.
Bump stocks use a semi-automatic’s recoil to allow it to slide back and forth while “bumping” the shooter’s trigger finger, resulting in rapid fire.
Justice Thomas wrote: “We conclude that semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.'”
If it ‘quacks like a duck’
In a dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “Today, the court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of ‘machine gun’ and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose.”
“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. A bump stock-equipped semi-automatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger’. Because I, like Congress, call that a machine gun, I respectfully dissent,” Justice Sotomayor said.
Federal law prohibits the sale or possession of machine guns, punishable by up to ten years in prison.
The bump stocks case centered on how the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a US Justice Department agency, interpreted the National Firearms Act, which defined machine guns as weapons that can “automatically” fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger”.
After a gunman used weapons outfitted with bump stocks in the Las Vegas shooting spree that killed 58 people and wounded hundreds more, Trump’s administration took action to prohibit the devices.
In a reversal of the agency’s previous stance, the ATF decided that bump stocks were covered by the National Firearms Act.
The Supreme Court, with its conservative minority, has taken an expansive view of gun rights, striking down gun restrictions in major cases in 2008, 2010 and in 2022.
In that 2022 decision, struck down New York state’s limits on carrying concealed handguns outside the home and set a tough new standard for determining the legality of gun regulations.
Unlike those three cases, this challenge was not centered on the US Constitution’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
Mr Cargill sued to challenge the bump stocks rule, which required him to surrender his two bump stocks.
“Those weapons do exactly what Congress meant to prohibit when it enacted the prohibition on machine guns,” Justice Department lawyer Brian Fletcher told the Supreme Court during arguments in the case in February in which the justices focused on technical aspects of bump stocks.
Mr Fletcher told the justices that “a single motion both initiates and maintains a multi-shot sequence”.
In January 2023, the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Mr Cargill in a divided opinion.
The United States is a country deeply divided over how to address gun violence that Mr Biden has called a “national embarrassment”.
He and many Democrats favour tougher gun restrictions, while Republicans often oppose them.
In this case, however, it was a Republican administration that implemented the regulation.
The Supreme Court had turned away some previous challenges to the bump stocks rule.
The justices also are expected to rule by the end of June in another gun rights case.
They heard arguments in November over the legality of a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns.
