US Supreme Court to decide legality of federal ban on gun 'bump stocks'
By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday trained its sights once again on gun rights, agreeing to decide the legality of a federal ban imposed under former President Donald Trump on «bump stock» devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns.
The justices agreed to hear an appeal by President Joe Biden's administration of a lower court's ruling in favor of Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban that was put in place under Trump following a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas.
The case centers on whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a U.S. Justice Department agency, properly interpreted a law banning machine guns as extending to bump stocks. The new rule, which reversed a prior stance by the agency, took effect in 2019.
Federal law prohibits the sale or possession of machine guns, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Machine guns are defined under a 1934 law called the National Firearms Act as weapons that can «automatically» fire more than one shot «by a single function of the trigger.»
Bump stocks use a semiautomatic's recoil to allow it to slide back and forth while «bumping» the shooter's trigger finger, resulting in rapid fire.
The Supreme Court previously had turned away some challenges to the bump stocks prohibition.
The Supreme Court's conservative majority has expanded gun rights in three major rulings since 2008, including in 2022 when the justices recognized for the first time that individuals have a constitutional right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense, and adopted a stringent test for assessing the legality of gun regulations.
The justices next Tuesday are set
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