US Supreme Court overturns ‘bump stock’ ban in blow for firearm restrictions

The US Supreme Court has dealt the latest blow to efforts to rein in firearms by overturning a Donald Trump-era ban on “bump stocks”, a device that greatly increases the firepower of ordinary rifles. 

In a 6-3 opinion, the high court on Friday held that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its authority in a 2018 rule that categorised bump stocks as a machine gun, a weapon that can fire multiple times when the trigger is pushed just once.

The rule came after the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, in which a lone gunman shot at a crowd during a music festival in Las Vegas with firearms including bump stocks, which allowed him to fire hundreds of rounds in mere minutes. He killed 58 people and wounded more than 500 others. 

The majority opinion written by conservative justice Clarence Thomas found that bump stocks do not meet the definition of machine guns, which are tightly restricted, under the National Firearms Act of 1934, which defines them as weapons that can fire “automatically more than one shot . . . by a single function of the trigger”.

Alongside images showing internal firing mechanisms, Thomas wrote that “[n]othing changes when a semi-automatic rifle is equipped with a bump stock” as only one shot is fired with one pull of the trigger. “The firing cycle remains the same.”

Thomas was joined in the majority opinion by all five of the court’s other conservative justices. 

In a dissent joined by the court’s three liberal justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the majority opinion “fixates” on firearms’ internal mechanisms — it “requires six diagrams and an animation to decipher the meaning of the statutory text” — rather than the “human act” of activating a trigger, as described in the gun law. “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,” she said.

“Today, the court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands,” she added.

The ATF had argued that when a bump stock was used, pulling the trigger once can generate multiple shots by maintaining pressure on the front grip of a gun.

After the decision Steven Dettelbach, ATF director, called on Congress to act on bump stocks. “As the 2017 massacre of nearly 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas made clear, weapons equipped with bump stocks pose an unacceptable level of risk to public safety,” he added.

Democrats decried the ruling. “Weapons of war have no place on the streets of America, but Trump’s Supreme Court justices have decided the gun lobby is more important than the safety of our kids and our communities,” the Biden-Harris campaign said in a statement. President Joe Biden and Trump are set to face off in the November’s presidential election in a rematch of 2020.

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Biden in a statement criticised Republican lawmakers seeking to “defund” the ATF. He added that the court’s decision “strikes down an important gun safety regulation. Americans should not have to live in fear of this mass devastation.”

Randy Kozuch, executive director of the National Rifle Association of America’s institute for legislative action, said the court “had properly restrained executive branch agencies to their role of enforcing, and not making, the law”, adding that the “decision will be pivotal to NRA’s future challenges of ATF regulations”. 

It is the latest victory for those in favour of gun rights. In another decision split along ideological lines, the court in 2022 struck down a New York state law, holding that its requirement for an individual to show “proper cause” to carry a concealed gun in public was unconstitutional. The opinion in that case was also authored by Thomas, one of the court’s staunchest conservatives.