The Supreme Court lifts the ban on the use of gun stocks

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semi-automatic weapons to fire as fast as machine guns and that was used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority found that the Trump administration failed to follow federal law by changing course and banning bumper actions after a gunman attacked a Las Vegas country music festival with assault rifles in 2017. The gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds into the crowd in 11 minutes, killing 60 people and injuring hundreds of others.

In the 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, a stock semi-automatic rifle is not an illegal machine gun because it does not fire more than one shot when the trigger is pulled.

“The cube only limits the time that passes between separate trigger functions,” Thomas wrote in a review that included numerous drawings of the weapon’s firing mechanisms.

He was joined by fellow conservatives John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Alito wrote a short dissenting opinion in which he emphasized that Congress could change the law to make rifle stocks equivalent to machine guns.

In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to the Las Vegas gunman. “In murdering so many people in such a short period of time, he did not rely on a quick trigger finger. Instead, he relied on emergency actions,” she said, reading a summary of her opposition to the floor.

Sotomayor said it is “deeply regrettable” that Congress must take action, but she hopes it will happen.

The ruling came after a Texas gun store owner challenged the ban, arguing that the Justice Department had incorrectly classified the accessories as illegal machine guns.

The Biden administration said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made the right choice on gun accessories that enable weapons to fire at hundreds of rounds per minute.

It marked the latest weapons case to come before the High Court. The conservative majority issued a landmark decision expanding gun rights in 2022 and is considering another gun case challenging federal law aimed at keeping guns away from people covered by domestic violence bans.

The arguments in the stockpile case, however, were more about whether the ATF had exceeded its authority than about the Second Amendment.

Justices on the court’s liberal wing suggested that it was “common sense” to believe that anything capable of unleashing a “torrent of bullets” was a machine gun under federal law. But the conservative justices raised questions about why Congress didn’t act to ban bump stocks, as well as the effects of the ATF’s change of heart a decade after the paraphernalia was deemed legal.

The Supreme Court took up the case after a split among lower courts over emergency actions, which were invented in the early 2000s. Under Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the ATF decided that stockpiles did not convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns. The agency reversed that decision under pressure from Trump after the Las Vegas shooting and another mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people.

Stocks are accessories that replace the stock of the rifle, i.e. the part that rests on the shoulder. They use the weapon’s recoil energy in such a way that the trigger hits the shooter’s stationary finger, allowing them to fire at a speed comparable to a traditional machine gun. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have their own bump stock bans.

The plaintiff, Texas gun store owner and military veteran Michael Cargill, was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group funded by conservative donors such as the Koch network. His lawyers acknowledged that stocks allow for rapid fire, but argued that they differ in that the shooter must exert greater effort to keep the weapon firing.

Government lawyers countered that the effort required from the shooter was minor and had no legal significance. The Justice Department said the ATF changed its mind about the emergency stockpile after conducting a more detailed investigation following the Las Vegas shooting and came to the appropriate conclusions.

When the ban went into effect in 2019, there were approximately 520,000 supplies in circulation, requiring people to surrender or destroy them, resulting in a total estimated loss of $100 million, plaintiffs say in court documents.

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