US supreme court strikes down federal ban on ‘bump stock’ devices for guns

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Conservative bloc

• Alito – Majority

• Barrett – Majority

• Gorsuch – Majority

• Kavanaugh – Majority

• Roberts – Majority

• Thomas – Majority

Liberal bloc

• Jackson – Minority

• Kagan – Minority

• Sotomayor – Minority

The US supreme court has struck down a federal ban on “bump stocks”, the devices which can vamp up semiautomatic firearms to discharge ammunition almost as rapidly as machine guns and that have been behind some of the most devastating mass shootings in recent history.

The ruling was 6-3, with the court’s liberal justices dissenting from the conservative majority’s decision. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a semiautomatic firearm equipped with a bump stock did not meet the definition of a machine gun, which are subject to stricter regulations.

The top court’s ruling in Garland v Cargill nullifies the Trump administration’s 2018 regulation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which ordered anyone who owned a bump stock to destroy it or hand it over to federal agents. The rule was passed after the devastating 2017 mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas, in which a gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds, killing 60 people and injuring almost 500.

After the ban, Michael Cargill, a US army veteran who owned a gun store in Austin, Texas, gave up several bump stocks in his possession. He then challenged the regulation before the supreme court.

In his concurring opinion, conservative justice Samuel Alito argued that the Las Vegas shooting “did not change the statutory text or its meaning”.

“That event demonstrated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun, and it thus strengthened the case for amending [the law on machine guns],” Alito wrote. “But an event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning.”

In her scathing dissent, liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor accused her conservative colleagues of ignoring bump stocks’ ability to transform semiautomatic firearms into much more powerful and deadly weapons.

“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. “A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger’ … Because I, like Congress, call that a machine gun, I respectfully dissent.”

The scrapping of the ban will dismay gun safety organizations such as Sandy Hook Promise, which has warned that bump stocks make guns all the more deadly by allowing multiple shots to be fired every second with just one pull of the trigger. Public reaction was so strong after the Las Vegas disaster that even the National Rifle Association, a body notorious for opposing gun regulations, joined the call for the add-ons to be taken out of circulation.

“Guns outfitted with bump stocks fire like machine guns, they kill like machine guns, and they should be banned like machine guns – but the supreme court just decided to put these deadly devices back on the market,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety. “We urge Congress to right this wrong and pass bipartisan legislation banning bump stocks, which are accessories of war that have no place in our communities.”

But with a Republican-controlled House, the passage of a bill banning bump stocks appears unlikely at this point.