The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a federal ban on bump stocks later in February, the latest opportunity for the high court to rule on gun violence and 2nd Amendment rights.
The case in question, Garland v. Cargill, came after the Trump administration banned bump stocks, attachments added to semiautomatic weapons to make them fire more quickly, classifying them as “machine guns,” which are banned by federal law.
Gun-rights groups filed suit in 2018, and after a lengthy legal battle, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on the case late next month.
Trump banned the bump stocks in 2018 via a rule from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which is under the Department of Justice umbrella. Trump’s ban came largely as a response to a Las Vegas 2017 mass shooting where nearly 60 were killed by a shooter using a bump stock device.
The rule requires those who own bump stocks to destroy them or hand them over to ATF.
“Specifically, these devices convert an otherwise semiautomatic firearm into a machinegun by functioning as a self-acting or self-regulating mechanism that harnesses the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm in a manner that allows the trigger to reset and continue firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter,” the DOJ rule summary said at the time. “Hence, a semiautomatic firearm to which a bump-stock-type device is attached is able to produce automatic fire with a single pull of the trigger.”
Gun advocates say the federal rule violates the 2nd amendment and is changing terms to broaden the definition of machine gun to include some semiautomatic weapons.
The Firearms Policy Coalition filed an amicus brief in that case this week, arguing the rule violates the Constitution.
“When ATF first considered the legality of bump stocks over twenty years ago, it correctly concluded that they do not qualify as ‘machineguns,’” the brief said. “Yet in 2018, in the face of acute political pressure, the agency reversed course and adopted a new definition of the term that encompasses the bump stocks at issue. Petitioners’ defense of that newfound interpretation either ignores the statute Congress enacted or seeks to rewrite it.”
