Supreme Court nixes ban on bump stocks for guns

The Supreme Court has overturned a Trump administration rule that sought to ban so-called bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic rifles to be fired like fully automatic machine guns.

In a 6-3 decision Friday that split the justices along ideological lines, the court said the definition federal regulators sought to adopt went beyond the words Congress wrote into law nearly nine decades ago.

In a ruling replete with diagrams of firing mechanisms, Justice Clarence Thomas said bump stock devices don’t convert semi-automatic weapons into automatic ones, but simply reduce the time between shots.

“Nothing changes when a semiautomatic rifle is equipped with a bump stock. The firing cycle remains the same,” Thomas wrote for the court’s conservative majority. “A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate ‘functions’ of the trigger. … A bump stock does not convert a semi automatic rifle into a machinegun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the court’s other two liberals, said the majority was seizing on technicalities that put form over substance.

“Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of ‘machinegun’ and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose,” Sotomayor wrote. “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 also declared that the ruling meant the court would soon have blood on its hands. “Today’s decision … will have deadly consequences,” she wrote.

For years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rejected the view that so-called bump stocks turned a weapon into a machine gun, but after a shooting massacre in Las Vegas in October 2017 that killed 58 people and wounded more than 500, President Donald Trump’s administration reversed course. The following year, ATF proposed and adopted what it called a clarification that swept bump stocks into the definition of machine guns.

In a brief solo concurrence Friday, Justice Samuel Alito made an argument increasingly deployed by critics of aggressive executive actions: that the White House effectively shut down the legislative process by moving unilaterally to redefine the meaning of a machine gun.

“Congress can amend the law — and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act,” Alito wrote.