The Supreme Court has struck down a federal Trump-era ban on bump stock sales

The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday struck down a federal ban on the sale of bump stocks, saying the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives overstepped its authority by banning the devices on the grounds that they were used to convert legal semi-automatic weapons into illegal rifles machine tools. The vote was 6–3, with the court’s three liberals expressing angry dissent.

Writing for the Court’s conservative majority, Justice Clarence Thomas noted that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a stock is not a “machine gun” because it will not fire more than one shot “with a single trigger action,” as the statute requires. He added that even if he could, he wouldn’t do it “automatically.” He wrote that the ATF exceeded its statutory authority by classifying the bump stocks as machine guns.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “the Congress that enacted” the law in question “would have recognized no material difference between a machine gun and a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a stock.” However, the text of the act is clear and we must comply with it. He added that Congress could – if it wanted to – change the law.

The question before the court was whether the stock transformed the semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun. The court said no.

President Trump ordered the ATF to ban the sale and possession of bump stocks in 2018 after one gunman in Las Vegas, using multiple weapons modified with bump stocks, killed 60 people and wounded 400 more – all in 11 minutes. Machine guns have been illegal in the U.S. since 1934, almost a century, and Congress has twice amended the National Firearms Act to state that machine gun parts alone count as machine guns.

The case was bought by the owner of a gun store in Austin, Texas, who was forced to give up two of his stockpiles after the ban went into effect. On Friday, the Supreme Court, siding with him, ruled that the ban on bump stocks was too far-reaching.

Writing on behalf of the dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused the conservative majority of once again turning a blind eye to the reality of gun violence and making it even more difficult to pass measures to prevent bloodshed. She said that “an artificially narrow majority definition hampers the government’s efforts to keep machine guns out of the hands of gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.”

“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,” Sotomayor wrote.

President Biden criticized the decision in a statement, adding: “Americans should not have to live in fear of this mass devastation.”

“I am calling on Congress to ban bump stocks, pass an assault weapons ban, and take additional action to save lives – send me the bill and I will sign it immediately,” he said.

The chances of Congress passing such a bill are slim.