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bump stocks
Supreme Court Puts 'Countless Lives in Danger' by Striking Down Bump Stock Ban
"Gun violence is already the leading cause of death for children and teens in our country," said Rep. Rashida Tlaib. "This will make mass shootings deadlier."
Jun 14, 2024
Gun control advocates and progressive lawmakers responded to Friday's U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down the Trump administration's bump stock ban with one overwhelming message: This decision will cost lives.
The justices ruled 6-3 along ideological lines in Garland v. Cargill that the administration of former President Donald Trump exceeded its power when it banned bump stocks after a gunman used assault rifles equipped with the accessory during the massacre of 60 people and wounding of more than 400 others at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017. It was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
The U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives' (ATF) final rule banning bump stocks went into effect in March 2019.
"This is a horrible decision that will undoubtedly result in more gun deaths," Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said on social media. "The bump stock ban had bipartisan support following the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history—this ruling is another example of SCOTUS legislating from the bench, against the will of the people."
Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) lamented that "gun violence is already the leading cause of death for children and teens in our country. This will make mass shootings deadlier."
"SCOTUS has blood on its hands," she added. "This unhinged Supreme Court needs to stop legislating from the bench."
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) decried what he called "a disgraceful decision by the Corrupt Supreme Court that will result in the death of more Americans, especially children."
"Congress must act swiftly to pass a bump stocks ban," he added. "Time to organize."
Gun control activists also condemned the ruling.
"The majority of justices today sided with the gun lobby instead of the safety of the American people. This is a shameful decision," said Giffords Law Center litigation director Esther Sanchez-Gomez. "Congress must act to undo the damage and make clear that bump stocks, and all automatic conversion devices, are illegal under federal law."
The group Everytown said: "Bump stocks were designed to skirt the law and mimic automatic fire. There is no reason anyone should be able to easily convert a weapon to fire 800 rounds per minute. Machine guns don't belong in our communities."
"The Supreme Court has put countless lives in danger," the group added. "Congress can and should right this deadly wrong by passing bipartisan legislation to ban bump stocks that has already been introduced in the House and Senate."
Stasha Rhodes, campaign director at the Supreme Court reform group United for Democracy, said in a statement that "today's ruling out of the Supreme Court is reckless and dangerous."
"In Las Vegas and communities across the country, we've seen how bump stocks can turn community gatherings into tragic, waking nightmares. That's why even the Trump administration banned them in 2017," she continued. "But this morning, the MAGA justices on the Supreme Court showed us the full extent of their radical, right-wing vision on firearms: machine guns everywhere."
"Our communities deserve the freedom to live safely in their communities," Rhodes added. "They deserve to have elected representatives, not politicians in robes, making policy decisions that impact their day-to-day lives."
Bump stocks are fitted in place of a rifle's butt stock and allow a semiautomatic weapon to fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing the gun's recoil energy. They greatly increase a gun's rate of fire at the expense of its accuracy, making semiautomatic weapons behave similar to machine guns.
Congress outlawed machine guns under the National Firearms Act of 1934, which defined such firearms as "any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger." The Gun Control Act of 1968 expanded this definition to include accessories that could be used to convert a weapon into a machine gun.
"A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority in Garland v. Cargill. "Even with a bump stock, a semiautomatic rifle will fire only one shot for every 'function of the trigger.'"
Writing for the dissenting liberal members of the court, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said: "Today, the court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress' definition of 'machine gun' and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose."
"Today's decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences," she added. "The majority's artificially narrow definition hamstrings the government's efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter."
Case plaintiff Michael Cargill, a Texas gun store owner, celebrated the ruling.
"Breaking news, I did it," Cargill said in a video posted on social media. "I beat them in the United States Supreme Court."
"I stood and fought, and because of this, the bump stock case is gonna be the case that saves everything," he continued. "It's gonna stop the ATF from coming after your brace, the triggers, all different parts and pieces that they're trying to ban."
"As always, more guns equals less crime," Cargill added. "You go out there and you buy yourself a gun. Better yet, get yourself a bump stock."
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Rejecting Bump Stock Ban, Federal Court Legalizes 'Instrument of Mass Murder'
Bump stocks were used to modify firearms used in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, which killed 60 people in Las Vegas in 2017.
Jan 07, 2023
Despite acknowledging "tremendous" public pressure to impose a ban on bump stocks, a firearm attachment used in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history, a federal appeals court on Friday rejected a 2019 Trump administration rule barring people from owning the instruments.
In a 13-3 ruling, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that the ban violated the Administrative Procedure Act and that the U.S. Congress must act to ban bump stocks rather than the executive branch.
The majority, made up mostly of judges appointed by Republican presidents, said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) at the U.S. Department of Justice wrongly interpreted a law banning machine guns when they extended that ban to bump stocks in 2019, two years after a gunman killed 60 people and injured hundreds of others in a shooting at a concert in Las Vegas.
"A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of 'machine gun' set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act," Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in the majority opinion.
\u201c5th Circuit: Bump stocks\u2014which transform semi-automatic rifles into fully automatic machine guns\u2014are legal under federal law. \n\nInvalidates a Trump-era rule that banned bump stocks after the device was used in the Las Vegas shooting that killed 60 people.\u201d— Mark Joseph Stern (@Mark Joseph Stern) 1673058883
The gunman used bump stocks to modify 12 firearms he used when he shot at the crowd from a hotel room. Bump stocks can be used to replace a rifle's stock, which is held against the shooter's shoulder, and allows the weapon to fire multiple rounds of ammunition more rapidly.
The three judges who dissented in Friday's ruling were appointed by Democratic presidents. One, Judge Stephen Higginson, wrote in an opinion that the majority employed technical legal reasoning "to legalize an instrument of mass murder," after three other federal appeals courts rejected challenges to the bump stock ban and the Supreme Court declined to hear appeals to two of those rulings last year.
"Under the majority's rule, the defendant wins by default whenever the government fails to prove that a statute unambiguously criminalizes the defendant's conduct," wrote Higginson.
Following Friday's decision, the Supreme Court could ultimately rule on the legality of bump stocks in the future.
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Are Recently Proposed Gun Regulations Constitutional?
Examining firearm reforms and the Second Amendment
Mar 03, 2018
Keeping and bearing arms is a constitutional right, but the Supreme Court has gone to great lengths to emphasize that it is not absolute. In 2008, the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller that "the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited."
In the wake of the Parkland, Florida school shooting, major U.S. retailers have decided to raise the minimum age to buy a gun to 21. Lawmakers and reform advocates, meanwhile, are offering several laws to regulate guns--but opponents of at least some of those reforms have cited the Second Amendment's 27 words to reject such proposals out of hand.
So do these recent proposals pass constitutional muster? Here, I analyze a handful of these policy suggestions to see if they are in line with recent federal court rulings on the Second Amendment.
Bans on Assault Rifles and Large-Capacity Magazines
Every federal appeals court that's ruled on assault rifle and large-capacity magazine bans has concluded that they comply with the Constitution. One court held that assault rifles aren't covered by the Second Amendment at all; others that even if they are covered, they still can be banned because doing so sufficiently advances public safety. No matter the reasoning, the outcome has been the same: the Second Amendment doesn't prevent these types of bans.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has had opportunities to overrule the lower courts, but the justices have consistently declined to do so.
Bans on Bump Stocks
Even the National Rifle Association has voiced support for restrictions on bump stocks--an attachment that allows semiautomatic weapons to fire faster.
A ban wouldn't directly restrict anyone's ability to have a firearm; it would just prohibit them from modifying firearms into something more like a machine gun. And in Heller, the Supreme Court strongly suggested that machine guns can be prohibited.
Age Limits on Firearm Purchases
The constitutionality of this restriction is a closer call; many rights come into effect at age 18. One common comparison is to the right to vote--but there, the Twenty-Sixth Amendment expressly sets the age at 18. Besides obvious differences between ballots and guns that could justify different treatment, no such language is in the Second Amendment.
Meanwhile, the leading Second Amendment case on age restrictions upheld a federal prohibition on handgun sales to people under 21. The court's conclusion turned on the fact that, historically, the age of majority was 21, not 18.
What's more, some have proposed raising the age for purchasing assault rifles only. As noted, complete bans on assault rifles are regularly upheld, so a less restrictive age requirement should be even safer under the Second Amendment.
Universal Background Checks
There appears to be no serious debate about whether requiring background checks for gun purchasers presents Second Amendment problems. In any event, no courts have held that the current background check system violates the right to keep and bear arms. The expansion of that system to more firearm transfers shouldn't affect that conclusion.
Waiting Periods
Waiting periods vary, but the 3-day period proposed in Florida is quite standard. Recently, in Silvester v. Harris, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld California's 10-day waiting period, and in February the Supreme Court opted not to disrupt that ruling. Under the Silvester analysis, the shorter 3-day period proposed in Florida is constitutional. Justice Clarence Thomas dissented from the Supreme Court's decision not to hear Silvester, arguing that the lower court's reasoning was flawed. No other justices signed on to his opinion.
The Upshot?
The Second Amendment presents a significant constitutional obstacle to some regulation, and we should not underestimate the powerful symbolic role it plays in gun politics. But if the tragic shooting in Parkland can overcome the perennial gridlock and spur a new round of legislating, and if recent federal court cases serve as our guide, these gun restrictions likely would not be struck down as unconstitutional.
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