The Supreme Court Friday overturned a federal agency’s rule banning bump stocks, the devices used in some of America’s deadliest mass killings carried out by lone shooters.
In a 6-3 decision penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had exceeded its authority by reclassifying the devices as “machine guns” in response to an unprecedentedly violent mass shooting.
Plaintiff Michael Cargill, an Austin, Texas, gun store owner, did not claim that the Second Amendment protected his right to own a bump stock. The case focused narrowly on the administrative process by which the ATF banned bump stocks, which harness a firearm’s recoil to achieve rates of firing that approach those of automatic weapons.
The ATF issued a rule in 2018 reclassifying bump stocks as machine guns, making them illegal for civilians to own under federal law. The bureau passed the rule in response to the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017, when a single shooter fired more than 1,000 rounds into a concert crowd, killing 60 people and injuring 850 more.
But the Supreme Court found that bump stocks did not meet the statutory definition of a “machine gun,” which requires that a gun fire automatically “by a single function of the trigger.”
“A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does,” Justice Thomas wrote.
The ATF had held in at least 10 separate instances before the Las Vegas shooting that affixing a bump stock to a semiautomatic weapon did not turn it into a machine gun, the opinion noted.
The ruling in Garland v. Cargill deals a heavy blow to gun reformers, who viewed a ban on bump stocks as a commonsense response to the deadliness such devices can wield in mass shootings.
After the Las Vegas shooting, a broad consensus formed that bump stocks, a small segment of the overall firearms industry, should be banned.
Congress, however, did not move swiftly to ban bump stocks in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting. Instead, then-President Donald Trump directed the ATF to restrict the devices.
The new Supreme Court ruling clarifies that Congress would have to impose the bump stock ban in order to remove the devices from the market.
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