Supreme Court Lifts Stockpile Ban, Alito Calls on Congress to Act

• The Supreme Court rejected the ban on the use of “bump stock” devices.
• The devices allow guns to fire bullets quickly and were used in the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas.
• Justice Samuel Alito wrote that Congress would agree to the ban but overturned it anyway.

“There is no doubt,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, that Congress would treat bump stocks like a machine gun.

The devices, which allow semi-automatic rifles to fire bullets at speeds close to those of machine guns, were banned by federal authorities in 2018 after the Las Vegas shooter used them to kill 60 people and wound more than 400 more.

But Alito and other conservative justices still ruled to throw out the ban, arguing that the text of Congress’s definition of machine guns – on which the ban was based – was not clear enough.

“The text of the act is clear and we must stick to it,” wrote the textualist.

On Friday, the Supreme Court overturned a ruling by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that classified bump stocks as “machine guns.”

The devices use the weapon’s recoil to reactivate the trigger more quickly, allowing the weapon to be fired at more than 800 rounds per minute.

The ATF had previously authorized the use of the devices but reclassified them during the Trump administration after the Oct. 1, 2017 shooting massacre in which a gunman fired on concertgoers from a nearby hotel.

However, Michael Cargill, a gun store owner from Austin, Texas, sued the federal government. He argued that the firearms law had been interpreted too broadly and that Congress never clearly intended the stockpile ban to be prohibited, challenging the law on statutory grounds rather than Second Amendment protections.

In their Friday decision, the court’s conservative justices agreed.

Writing for the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the stock could not be considered a machine gun because it did not fire more than one bullet per trigger pull – it accelerated the number of trigger pulls.

“A stock does not turn a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does,” Thomas wrote.

Alito, echoing his sentiment, said the “terrible shooting spree” in Las Vegas proved that a stock gun could cause the same kind of death as a machine gun.

But Alito said Congress must make clear that it also wants to ban buffer actions by changing the law or passing a new one.

“Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act,” Alito said.

In a separate opinion joined by the court’s other liberal members, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the decision “artificially narrow” and warned it would have “deadly consequences.”

“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.