US Supreme Court rejects federal ban on gun 'bump stocks'
U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declared unlawful a federal ban on «bump stock» devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns, rejecting yet another firearms restriction — this time one enacted under Republican former President Donald Trump.
The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, upheld a lower court's decision siding with Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban by claiming that a U.S. agency improperly interpreted a federal law banning machine guns as extending to bump stocks. The conservative justices were in the majority, with the liberal justices dissenting.
The rule was imposed in 2019 by Trump's administration after the devices were used during a 2017 mass shooting that killed 58 people at a Las Vegas country music festival. The policy was defended in court by Democratic President Joe Biden's administration.
«This case asks whether a bump stock — an accessory for a semiautomatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire) — converts the rifle into a 'machinegun.' We hold that it does not and therefore affirm» the lower court's ruling, Thomas wrote.
Federal officials have said the rule was needed to protect public safety in the United States, a nation facing persistent firearms violence.
Bump stocks use a semiautomatic's recoil to allow it to slide back and
