A divided U.S. Supreme Court has dealt a new blow to gun regulation efforts by striking down a federal ban on firearms, accessories that allow a semi-automatic rifle to fire at a speed that rivals a machine gun.
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(Bloomberg) — A divided U.S. Supreme Court dealt a new blow to gun regulation efforts by striking down a federal ban on firearms, accessories that allow a semi-automatic rifle to fire at speeds that rival a machine gun.
By a 6-3 vote, the justices invalidated a criminal ban imposed by the Trump administration after the 2017 Las Vegas concert massacre, when a man using oil stockpiles killed 60 people. This attack was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
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The case is one of two gun disputes the court is considering in its 2023-2024 term, along with a constitutional clash over the federal gun ban for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. The unexpected battle was over the reach of federal law rather than the Second Amendment, the constitutional provision the court has used to expand gun rights in recent years.
A 1986 law prohibits most people from owning fully automatic machine guns or parts designed to convert weapons into machine guns. The issue was whether traumatic stocks met the law's definition of submachine guns as weapons that could “automatically” fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.”
“A bump stock does not turn a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter uses a lightning-fast trigger finger,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court's majority.
Bump stocks replace the rifle's standard stock — the part that rests on the shooter's shoulder — with a plastic sleeve that allows the weapon to slide back and forth. The device harnesses the recoil energy when a bullet is fired, causing the gun to slide backwards and separate from the trigger finger. Disconnecting allows the release mechanism to be reset.
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By applying sustained forward pressure with the non-trigger hand, the shooter can then push the gun forward so that it “impacts” the trigger finger, even without moving the finger.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“The artificially narrow definition of a majority hampers government efforts to keep automatic weapons from the hands of gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter,” Sotomayor wrote to the group. She took the unusual step of reading her opposition summary from the bench for confirmation.
The case is Garland v. Cargill, 22-976.
– With assistance from Eric Larson.
(Updates with excerpts from opinions starting in fifth paragraph.)
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