The Supreme Court has ruled the ATF exceeded its authority in 2018 when ruling that bump stocks convert rifles into machine guns and therefore they should be illegal.
This from therightscoop.com.
The ruling was 6-3, with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissenting.
According to Amy Howe with SCOTUSBLOG:
The question in this case is whether a bumpstock (an accessory for a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger to fire very quickly) converts the rifle into a machinegun. The court holds that it does not.
The Thomas opinion explains that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machinegun’ because it does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger’ as the statute requires.
Alito has a concurring opinion in which he says that he joins the court’s opinion because there ‘is simply no other way to read the statutory language. There can be little doubt,’ he writes, ‘that the Congress that enacted’ the law at issue here ‘would not have seen any material difference between a machinegun and a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bumpstock. But the statutory text is clear, and we must follow it.’
Alito suggests that Congress ‘can amend the law–and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation.’
Michael Cargill celebrated Friday beating the ATF at the Supreme Court on the bump stock ban.
Cargill said he was told not to file the lawsuit, that it wasn’t worth doing. But he did it anyway and now he has won, explaining that there is case law against this type of ban that will help us keep our second amendment rights protected.
Thank you, Michael Cargill.
He explained below:
I WON 6-3 Garland vs Cargill@centexguns @ComeAndTalkIt @NCLAlegal #bumpstock #CargillVGarland pic.twitter.com/g3K7FcGU6g
— Michael Cargill (@michaeldcargill) June 14, 2024
Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s stock, the part that gets pressed against the shooter’s shoulder. When a person fires a semiautomatic weapon fitted with a bump stock, it uses the gun’s recoil energy to rapidly and repeatedly bump the trigger against the shooter’s finger:
That allows the weapon to fire dozens of bullets in a matter of seconds.
Bump stocks were invented in the early 2000s after the expiration of a 1994 ban targeting assault weapons. The federal government approved the sale of bump stocks in 2010 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concluded that guns equipped with the devices should not be considered illegal machine guns under federal law.
According to court documents, more than 520,000 bump stocks were in circulation by the time the government reversed course and imposed a ban that took effect in 2019.
More than 22,000 people were attending a country music festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017, when a man opened fire on the crowd from the window of his high-rise hotel room. He fired more than 1,000 rounds in the crowd in 11 minutes, leaving 60 people dead and injuring hundreds more.
Authorities found an arsenal of 23 assault-style rifles in the shooter’s hotel room, including 14 weapons fitted with bump stocks.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the ATF reconsidered whether bump stocks could be sold and owned legally. With support from Trump, a Republican, the agency in 2018 ordered a ban on the devices, arguing they turned rifles into illegal machine guns.
Bump stock owners were given until March 2019 to surrender or destroy them.
The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said the ATF did not have the authority to issue the regulation banning bump stocks. The justices said a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.
Justice Samuel Alito, who joined the majority, wrote in a separate opinion that the Las Vegas shooting strengthened the case for changing the law to outlaw bump stocks like machine guns. But that has to happen through action by Congress, not through regulation, he wrote.
The court’s three liberal justices opposed the ruling. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that there’s no commonsense difference between a machine gun and a semiautomatic firearm with a bump stock.
She wrote:
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.
At least 15 states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump stocks, though some could be affected by the high court’s ruling.
According David Pucino, legal director of the gun control think tank Giffords:
Most state laws, however, remain in place because the decision covered the ATF rule, not the constitutionality of state-level bans.
A group called the New Civil Liberties Alliance sued to challenge the bump stock ban on behalf of Michael Cargill, a Texas gun shop owner.
According to court document:
Cargill bought two bump stocks in 2018 and then surrendered them once the federal ban took effect.
The Supreme Court took up the case after lower federal courts delivered conflicting rulings on whether the ATF could ban bump stocks.
The ban survived challenges before the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Denver-based 10th Circuit, and the federal circuit court in Washington.
But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals based in New Orleans struck down the bump stock ban when it ruled in the Texas case last year. The court’s majority in the 13-3 decision found that “a plain reading of the statutory language” showed that weapons fitted with bump stocks could not be regulated as machine guns.
Final thought: Again, thank you Michael Cargill for your determination.
