If one listened to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), one might think that former President Donald Trump just legalized bump stocks in the United States.
The U. S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in the Garland v. Cargill case on Friday last week that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives overstepped its bounds when it banned bump stocks in 2018.
A bump stock is an attachment for a semi-automatic firearm that harnesses recoil to increase the firing rate, simulating the rapid fire of a fully automatic weapon.
The court did not find that there is a constitutional right to own a bump stock, but instead that current federal law doesn’t ban owning a bump stock.
Responding to the decision, Schumer lambasted the Supreme Court as MAGA — short for Make America Great Again. He made the comment despite it being former President Donald Trump who banned bump stocks in the first place.
Last Friday, the MAGA Supreme Court struck once again, saying the federal government cannot prohibit the use of bump stocks, the accessory responsible for the deadliest shooting in American history.
Nearly seven years ago, a lone shooter fired over 1,000 rounds in just ten minutes upon a crowd of concertgoers in Las Vegas. Sixty innocent people were murdered. Another 850 were injured. This was all possible because the shooter modified his rifles to function essentially as machine guns. The ATF under the Trump Administration banned the use of these accessories shortly after the Las Vegas shooting.
Yet on Friday, the MAGA court reached the incredible conclusion that weapons modified to act like machine guns, to fire bullets at almost the same rate as machine guns, and which in Justice Alito’s own admission do not show “any material difference” with machine guns are somehow not machine guns, which have been banned for a very long time, since the ‘30s.
As Schumer points out, Trump signed an executive order in March 2018 banning bump stocks. He ordered Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to classify them as machine guns, which are federally illegal to own.
However, in the majority opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said that, by definition, a bump stock is not a machine gun.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 defines a “machinegun” 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.” 26 U. S. C. §5845(b). With a machinegun, a shooter can fire multiple times, or even continuously, by engaging the trigger only once. This capability distinguishes a machinegun from a semiautomatic firearm. With a semiautomatic firearm, the shooter can fire only one time by engaging the trigger. Using a technique called bump firing, shooters can fire semiautomatic firearms at rates approaching those of some machineguns. A shooter who bump fires a rifle uses the firearm’s recoil to help rapidly manipulate the trigger. Although bump firing does not require any additional equipment, a “bump stock” is an accessory designed to make the technique easier. A bump stock does not alter the basic mechanics of bump firing, and the trigger still must be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot.
For many years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) consistently took the position that semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump stocks were not machineguns under §5845(b). ATF abruptly changed course when a gunman using semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump stocks fired hundreds of rounds into a crowd in Las Vegas, Nevada, killing 58 people and wounding over 500 more. ATF subsequently proposed a rule that would repudiate its previous guidance and amend its regulations to “clarify” that bump stocks are machineguns. 83 Fed. Reg. 13442. ATF’s Rule ordered owners of bump stocks either to destroy or surrender them to ATF to avoid criminal prosecution.
Thomas, Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch were the six who supported overturning the bump stock ban, while Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan voted to uphold it.
Trump nominated Barrett, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch to the court.
Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb praised the Supreme Court for, in his view, getting it right.
“This is a significant victory for gun owners because it reminds the ATF it simply cannot rewrite federal law,” Gottlieb said in a written statement he emailed to NewBostonPost. “The agency has just been reminded that it can only enforce the law, not usurp the authority of Congress.”
Since the decision, Trump has not yet called on Congress to ban bump stocks. However, during his presidency, he considered bump stocks to be an avenue to turn legal guns into machine guns.
“As I promised, today the Department of Justice will issue the rule banning BUMP STOCKS with a mandated comment period,” Trump tweeted in March 2018, according to CNN. “We will BAN all devices that turn legal weapons into illegal machine guns.”
Congress could still pass a law banning bump stocks, but with Republicans controlling the U.S. House of Representatives, that appears unlikely this session.
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Photo by WASR; Wikimedia Commons 
