A divided Supreme Court on Friday struck down a federal ban on bump stock devices that allow semiautomatic rifles to fire hundreds of bullets a minute, upending one of the few recent efforts by the federal government to address the nation’s epidemic of gun violence.
The 6-3 ruling continues the conservative majority’s record of limiting gun restrictions, most notably in a landmark 2022 ruling that has made it easier to challenge modern gun control laws.
In its ruling, the majority said bump stocks do not qualify as machine guns under a 1986 law that barred civilians from owning the weapons. The Trump administration interpreted the law to ban bump stocks in 2018, after a gunman used the devices to open fire on a Las Vegas music festival, ultimately killing 60 people in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
In dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority’s opinion would have “deadly consequences,” adding that the court “hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.”
Michael Cargill, a U.S. Army veteran and the owner of a gun shop in Austin challenged the ban after he was forced to surrender two bump stocks. He argued the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms overreached when it reclassified bump stocks as machine guns in 2017 following public calls to ban the devices.
The agency had previously ruled it was legal to own bump stocks, finding they weren’t machine guns. Americans bought about 520,000 bump stocks between 2008 and 2017, while they were legal, according to figures from ATF.
Bump stocks are a piece of molded plastic or metal that replaces the butt of a rifle and the handle closest to the trigger. The piece allows a portion of the gun to slide freely back-and-forth. The recoil from a shot causes the gun to “bump” between the shooter’s shoulder and trigger finger, causing shots to be fired in quick succession.
Rifles equipped with bump stocks can fire an estimated 400 to 800 bullets per minute, a rate approaching that of automatic weapons.
The case, known as Garland v. Cargill, turned on whether bump stocks meet the definition of a machine gun under the 1986 law. Federal appeals court were sharply divided over that question in five earlier decisions on the ban’s legality, before the Supreme Court took up Cargill’s lawsuit.
Cargill’s case did not directly involve the Second Amendment, but is rather a test of the reach of a federal agency to enact and interpret regulations – a major theme in the current Supreme Court term. Other cases deal with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a legal precedent that says courts should defer to agency interpretations of ambiguous statutes if they are reasonable.
The 1986 law defines a machine gun as “any weapon which 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.”
The Biden administration defended the Trump administration’s interpretation that bump stocks are machine guns, arguing the devices allow semiautomatic rifles to fire automatically with a single pull of the trigger. But attorneys for Cargill disputed that characterization, saying bump stocks are activated through repeated pulls of the trigger.
Much of the oral arguments in the case in February were consumed by how bump stocks work. At one point, Justice Elena Kagan and Cargill’s attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, took turns using their hands to demonstrate what it looks like to fire a gun equipped with one of the devices.
Bump stocks were invented in the early 200os, but the question of their legality has often shifted. In 2o03, ATF said an early version was not a machine gun, but later revised its position to ban a version of the device that had an internal spring that aided firing. The agency again reversed course in 2008, approving a model without the spring.
During oral argument, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh questioned the government’s evolving interpretation of whether bump stocks were machine guns. Gorsuch added he could understand why the government would want to ban the devices, but said Congress needed to explicitly do it.
Liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Kagan said bump stocks were the very kind of weapons that Congress intended to ban with the 1986 machine gun law.
Cargill filed his lawsuit challenging the ban in 2019, on the same day he surrendered his bump stocks to ATF.
A U.S. District Court dismissed Cargill’s claims and a three-judge panel of the conservative 5th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling. The full 5th Circuit Court of Appeals then heard the case and reversed the decision. The Biden administration appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court struck down a New York law that required a license to carry a gun in public in 2022. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas established a major new test that required gun restrictions be consistent with the nation’s history of firearm regulations.
Gun advocates have since challenged dozens of gun regulations in the courts, arguing they don’t have analogues in American history. The effort has resulted in a messy, unsettled landscape for gun regulations.
Some courts have upheld restrictions, while others have knocked down bans on “ghost guns,” high-capacity magazines, restrictions on the purchase of firearms by young adults and other provisions.
The legal fights have played out at a moment of national anguish over gun violence and fierce debates about gun control.
Last year, there were 39 mass shootings in the United States, the highest number in any year since 2006, according to a Washington Post tracker. Another Post database found school shootings hit a record of 46 in 2022, the most since at least 1999. A surge in homicides during the pandemic also stirred concerns, although the trend has eased in most places.
(c) Washington Post
