The Supreme Court struck down the Trump-era ban on firearm stocks

Washington – On Friday, the Supreme Court invalidated a federal regulation passed during the Trump administration that banned bump stocks, devices that significantly increase the rate of fire of semi-automatic weapons.

The 6-3 ruling found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority by issuing the ban in 2018, following Mass shootings in 2017 at a Las Vegas music festival, the deadliest in U.S. history. Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the court’s opinion, which was divided along ideological lines. Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissenting opinion to the bench.

“In this case, we ask whether a stock – an attachment to a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to quickly re-press the trigger (and thus achieve a high rate of fire) – transforms the rifle into a ‘machine gun.’ We believe this is not the case,” Thomas wrote on behalf of the conservative majority.

The court’s ruling reverses one of the few actions the federal government has taken in recent years to combat gun violence since Republicans in Congress opposed comprehensive firearms restrictions. The case did not involve the Second Amendment, but was one of several heard by the justices this term involving federal regulatory powers.

Opinions

Most of Thomas’ opinions were highly technical and concerned the mechanics and components of semi-automatic weapons. It included several graphics showing how firearms worked.

The court ultimately held that for a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a stock, the trigger must be released and re-engaged to fire each additional shot, distinguishing it from a machine gun in which the shooter can fire continuously after pressing the trigger once. Machine guns are banned under federal law.

“Stocks merely reduce the time that elapses between separate trigger ‘functions’,” Thomas wrote for the majority. “The group makes it easier for the shooter to move the gun back toward the shoulder, thus releasing pressure from the trigger and re-setting it. It also helps the shooter press the trigger to his finger very quickly afterwards. The stock does not turn a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger.”

In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor emphasized that a stock-equipped rifle can fire at a rate of 400 to 800 rounds per minute and wrote that the textual evidence presented shows that the stock-equipped weapon is a rifle machine.

“The majority’s reading flies in the face of this court’s standard tools of legal interpretation,” Sotomayor wrote. “By setting aside the statute’s plain meaning both at the time of its enactment and today, the majority guts Congress’s machine gun regulations and enables gun users and manufacturers to circumvent federal law.”

She warned the ruling would have “deadly consequences,” hampering government efforts to “keep machine guns out of gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.”

In response to this decision, President Biden urged Congress to pass legislation banning bump stocks and assault weapons, which he promised to sign.

“Today’s decision repeals an important gun safety regulation,” Biden said in a statement. “Americans should not live in fear of this mass devastation.”

Steven Dettelbach, ATF director, said the agency is ready to work with Congress to ensure that excess stockpiles “no longer pose a threat to American law enforcement and the people they protect.”

Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, which represented a Texas resident who challenged the ban, praised the decision and said it vindicated their position that the ATF does not have the authority to change the law.

“The statute enacted by Congress did not prohibit bump actions, and ATF does not have the authority to do so on its own,” he said in a statement. “This result is entirely consistent with the Constitution’s assignment of all legislative power to Congress. Motivated opponents should direct all views to Congress, not to the court that faithfully applied the statute before it.”

Bump stock is prohibited.

Stocks are additions that increase the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles to hundreds of shots per minute. The case known as Garland v. Cargill focused on whether the ATF had gone too far banned the use of these devices in 2018 after determining that the 1934 law’s definition of “machine gun” included stocks.

Between 2008 and 2017, ATF repeatedly stated that inventory increases were occurring they did not qualify as machine guns and were not regulated by appropriate legal provisions. But the bureau changed its position after the 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Musical Festival, in which a gunman killed 58 people and injured another 500, and after which Congress failed to act to regulate the devices.

According to the FBI, the shooter used a semi-automatic weapon equipped with a stock that allowed him to fire up to 1,000 rounds of ammunition in 11 minutes.

Released in December 2018, titled a new rule was given that a rifle equipped with a stock qualifies as a machine gun in part because when the shooter pulls the trigger, he initiates a firing sequence that produces more than one shot. This firing sequence is “automatic” because “the device harnesses the weapon’s recoil energy in a continuous back-and-forth motion cycle that allows the shooter to achieve continuous fire with a single trigger pull.”

A bulge stock replaces the standard stock of a semi-automatic rifle and allows the rest of the weapon to move back and forth while the stock remains in place. When the gun is fired and the shooter applies forward pressure on the barrel, the rifle recoils back into the stock and springs forward again, “hitting” the trigger on the shooter’s finger and firing another round.

The Trump administration’s order went into effect in March 2019. Those who already had supplies were required to destroy or turn over the devices to the ATF under threat of criminal penalties.

During the agency’s rulemaking process, Michael Cargill purchased two bump stocks. After the ban went into effect, he turned the devices over to ATF and filed a lawsuit against the government in federal court in Texas.

A U.S. district court and a three-judge appellate court panel ruled in favor of the ATF, but a full panel of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit invalidated the bump stock ban.

The Cargill case was not the only challenge to the regulation. Another stock owner prevailed before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, but a three-judge Washington appeals court panel upheld the ban after determining that the stock was a machine gun under federal law.

The Biden administration has supported the stockpile ban and urged the Supreme Court to leave the policy in place. Rifles equipped with these devices are “dangerous and unusual weapons,” Justice Department lawyers argued, saying the stocks could circumvent a 1986 ban on machine guns.

A majority of the Supreme Court rejected opponents’ view that its decision circumvented the federal ban on machine guns, arguing that the law still regulates traditional machine guns.

“The fact that it does not cover other high-rate weapons clearly does not render the law useless,” Thomas wrote. “Furthermore, it is difficult to see how the ATF can convincingly argue otherwise, given that for nearly a decade, in multiple separate decisions, it has taken the consistent position that (the law) does not cover semi-automatic rifles equipped with bump stocks.”

The majority also noted that Congress could have tied the definition of “machine gun” to the weapon’s rate of fire, but instead passed a federal law specifying whether a firearm could fire more than one shot “automatically” with a single trigger function.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito also placed the burden on Congress and said the Las Vegas tragedy strengthened the case for amending a 1934 law, the National Firearms Act, on which the ATF relied to ban stockpiles.

“There is a simple way to treat rifle stocks and machine guns differently,” Alito wrote. “Congress can change the law – and may have already done so if the ATF had stuck to its prior interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”

But the decision sparked a backlash from gun violence prevention groups that said it put people at risk.

“Weapons equipped with stock guns shoot like machine guns, kill like machine guns, and should be banned like machine guns, but the Supreme Court has just decided to put these deadly devices back on the market,” John Feinblatt, Everytown’s president of Gun Safety, wrote in statement. “We call on Congress to correct this mistake and pass bipartisan legislation to ban stockpiles, which are paraphernalia of war that have no place in our communities.”