Supreme Court Agrees to Decide If Bump Stocks Can Be Banned

WASHINGTON -- he Supreme Court agreed this month to hear a case that will decide whether a District of Columbia federal court’s decision that prohibits gun bump stocks will withstand a constitutional challenge.

Bump stocks are gun attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.

The Justice Department banned them after a 2017 mass shooting in which a gunman killed 59 people by firing into a crowd from a Las Vegas hotel window using assault rifles modified with bump stocks. The retired postal worker fired more than 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes into a crowd of 22,000 music fans.

The ban led to court challenges by gun rights advocates claiming Second Amendment rights.

A key issue is whether guns with bump stock attachments are machine guns. There is no dispute that machine guns are weapons of mass destruction that are not allowed under the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms for self-defense.

The National Firearms and Gun Control Act defines a machine gun 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.”

Plaintiffs who challenge the Justice Department regulation say guns modified with bump stocks are different than machine guns.

Bump stocks harness the recoil energy of a semi-automatic firearm to reset the trigger with each shot, thereby allowing the gun to continue “firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter,” according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

However, the shooter must keep forward pressure on the gun with the non-shooting hand while also pushing on the trigger.

That small distinction led the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to say any difference from a machine gun was too small to interpret a bump stock any other way.

The court’s opinion written by Judge Robert Wilkins said that “under the best interpretation of the statute, a bump stock is a self-regulating mechanism that allows a shooter to shoot more than one shot through a single pull of the trigger. As such, it is a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act.”

The U.S. 5th Circuit disagreed, writing in a January ruling, “The definition of ‘machinegun’ as set forth in the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act does not apply to bump stocks.”

Congress would have to change federal law before bump stocks could be banned, the 5th Circuit’s 13-to-3 ruling said.

A contributing issue is whether the Justice Department exceeded its authority with the ban, which took effect in 2019.

A Supreme Court decision is expected by early summer in Garland v. Cargill, 22-976.

For more information, contact The Legal Forum (www.legal-forum.net) at email: tramstack@gmail.com or phone: 202-479-7240.