The case is the second involving guns that the Supreme Court will be deciding this year. It centers on bump stocks, which use the kickback of a semi-automatic firearm to mimic automatic firing.
WASHINGTON − After the deadliest mass shooting in the nation’s history, then-President Donald Trump vowed he would get rid of the device that turns a semi-automatic rifle into something closer to a machine gun.
“We’re knocking out bump stocks,” Trump said in 2018, on the one-year anniversary of the Las Vegas shooting. “I’ve told the NRA bump stocks are gone (in) two or three weeks.”
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will consider whether the Justice Department had the authority to impose that ban.
Unlike the high court’s pending decision on a law banning domestic abusers from owning guns, this one doesn’t rest on the 2nd Amendment. Instead, it turns on competing explanations of how a bump stock works and whether it meets the legal definition of a machine gun.
Does it allow the weapon to be continually fired once the shooter depresses the trigger? Or must the gun’s trigger be reactivated by the shooter between every shot?
A nation besieged by gun violence
The justices will hear the case as the nation continues to be besieged by gun violence. The Valentine’s Day mass shooting in Kansas City was the 50th reported so far in 2024.
The deadliest mass shooting was in 2017 when a gunman, using bump stocks, fired from a hotel window at concertgoers in Las Vegas. Fifty-eight people were killed immediately, and others died later. Hundreds were injured.
The gunman used 22 semiautomatic rifles, 14 of them equipped with bump stocks.
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The Justice Department had long taken the view that bump stocks fell outside a federal law banning machine guns. But it reversed that position after months of pressure from Trump and others in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting.
Texas gun shop owner sues over bump stocks ban
Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, sued the government over the ban. The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Cargill and the Biden administration appealed.
“Congress did not ban all new machine guns in 1986, only to allow the ban to be circumvented by a trivial shift in the locus of the shooter’s pressure from the trigger to the front grip, the barrel, a button, or any other similar contrivance,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar told the court.
Under a law modified in 1986, a machine gun is defined 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.”
As many as 800 rounds a minute
Bump stocks combine two legal devices, a plastic stock and a firearm, that together function like a machine gun. The bump stock harnesses the recoil of the rifle to accelerate trigger pulls, technically “bumping” the trigger for each shot after it bounces off the shooter’s shoulder. A rifle can then fire between 400 and 800 rounds per minute.
In 2018, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said that meets the definition of machine gun. In contrast with previous decisions that reached the opposite conclusion, the Justice Department said, the latest interpretation of “automatically” is in line with the common use of the word.
The only difference with a traditional machine gun, the Justice Department says, is the machine gun relies on the back-and-forth movement of the gun’s internal parts while a bump stock relies on the back-and-forth movement of the entire forward portion of the rifle.
Cargill’s lawyers say there’s nothing “automatic” about the process. A shooter must continually thrust the barrel or front grip of the rifle forward with his non-trigger hand while applying reward pressure with the other hand.
“There is no motor, no spring, no electrical device, or anything else that might automate a manual task,” his lawyers told the court.
The multiple gun rights groups that have weighed in on the case point out that hundreds of thousands of Americans own bump stocks, relying on the government’s pre-2018 determinations that they are allowed.
The groups also ask: What’s next? If a president can order the ATF to ban bump stocks, he could use the same definition to ban semi-automatic weapons, they argue.
“Imposing criminal liability comes with stigma and the loss of liberty,” the National Rifle Association wrote in a separate filing, which said only Congress – not the ATF – can make such “moral judgments.”
More: Trump administration banned rapid-fire bump stocks, but a half-million have already been sold
Bump stocks ‘a tool for indiscriminate murder,’ gun control groups say
Gun control groups call bump stocks a “unique danger to society,” suited only for spraying many bullets in a short time.
“In the hands of a gunman bent on killing as many people as possible, they are a tool for indiscriminate murder: one need only aim a bump-stock-equipped rifle at a crowd and pull the trigger once,” the groups told the court.
Likewise, the American Medical Association and other groups representing physicians said they’ve seen first-hand the “enormous human carnage, destruction and chaos” caused by rapid-fire bullets.
“Firearms modified by bump stocks have no place in a civilized society,” they wrote.
A decision in the case, Garland v. Cargill, is expected by the end of June.
More: Who are the current Supreme Court justices? Get to know the bench in 2024.
Contributing: Nick Penzenstadler.