U.S. Supreme Court overturns the ban on bump stocks that were employed for Las Vegas mass shooting 

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday struck down a rule enacted following a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that defined a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock attachment as a machine gun, which is generally prohibited under federal law.

Ariana Figueroa
14/06/2024

The opinion, authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, reduces the executive branch’s ability to tackle gun violence. Thomas is a fervent advocate for Second Amendment gun rights, stated in his opinion that Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was in excess of its authority under the law by restricting the sale and use for bump guns, which he claimed differed significantly from machine guns.

“Nothing changes when a semiautomatic rifle is equipped with a bump stock,” Thomas wrote. “Between every shot, the shooter must release pressure from the trigger and allow it to reset before reengaging the trigger for another shot.”

Garland v. Cargill, the case Garland V. Cargill was a 6-3 ruling which broke with the courts’ established ideological lines.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the highest-ranking judge on the liberal wing of the court, wrote the dissent and said that the ruling puts “bump stocks back in civilian hands.”

“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,” she wrote. “A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.”

Setbacks in gun safety

The White House slammed the decision.

“Today’s decision strikes down an important gun safety regulation,” President Joe Biden stated in an announcement. “Americans should not have to live in fear of this mass devastation.”

Biden has urged Congress to prohibit bump stocks as well as assault weapons, but any legislation relating to guns will likely be blocked because of Republicans dominating in the House and Democrats having a slim majority of the Senate.

“Bump stocks have played a devastating role in many of the horrific mass shootings in our country, but sadly it’s no surprise to see the Supreme Court roll back this necessary public safety rule as they push their out of touch extreme agenda,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stated in an announcement.

Trump-era rule

This incident is a result of a law that was enacted during the Trump administration, following the mass shooting in Las Vegas. A gunman used guns fitted with bump stocks to shoot into the crowd at an event which killed 58 people that night. Two more passed away from their injuries later. They also injured over 500.

The following year in the year following, the ATF released a ruling that declared bump stocks prohibited machine guns. Anyone who owned bump stocks was required to dispose of the product or hand it over to the agency in order to avoid criminal sanctions.

Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner in Austin, Texas, surrendered two bump stocks to ATF and later contesting the law in federal court.

The U.S. district court dismissed his case, however, an appeals court in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit agreed with Cargill that the statute’s definition of what constitutes a “machine” guns does have no application to bump stocks since rifles with these attachments aren’t able to shoot multiple bullets “automatically,” or “by a single function of the trigger.”

The law defines machine guns 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 fought the decision of the 5th Circuit to the Supreme Court.

Arguments before the High Court

In the oral arguments, Biden administration has defended the rule in the Trump era and claimed bump stocks permit semiautomatic rifles to fire at the touch of the trigger.

Lawyers for Cargill claimed that bump stocks are fired by pulling the trigger multiple times instead of firing it automatically by pulling a single.

In her dissent, Sotomayor noted that her decision would restrain what the government can do in its “efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.”

Thomas was also the author of a landmark firearm ruling in 2022 which declared invalid the New York law against carrying firearms in public, without proving a need for security. The court made its decision in accordance with 14th Amendment grounds, but it also widened Second Amendment rights.

Due to the 2022 decision Another case related to guns is being heard by the courts this week, which will test the federal law prohibiting guns from being owned by someone who is under an order of protection against domestic violence. The court is expected to make a decision in this month.

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