WASHINGTON (CN) — The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that bump stocks cannot be banned, finding that the devices cannot be included in a law banning machine guns.
Split along ideological lines, the court held that semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump stocks are not machine guns because they cannot fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger.
“A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does," Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the conservative majority.
Bump stocks are an add-on device for semiautomatic weapons that let shooters fire hundreds of rounds per minute. They attach to the end of a rifle held against the shoulder and slide back and forth to trigger the firing sequence. A government estimate put a semiautomatic weapon’s firing capability at around 60 bullets per minute. The bump stock takes that number up to between 400 and 800 bullets per minute.
The George H.W. Bush appointee said releasing and resetting the trigger made firing each shot a separate and distinct function of the trigger — differing from the automatic fire of machine guns.
“All that a bump stock does is accelerate the rate of fire by causing these distinct ‘function[s]’ of the trigger to occur in rapid succession,” Thomas wrote.
In a fiery dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the court substituted its own view of what constitutes a machine gun instead of looking to lawmakers’ definition.
“Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences,” the Barack Obama appointee wrote. “The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.”
President Joe Biden said the ruling struck down an important gun safety regulation. Biden said his administration has used every tool in its arsenal to combat gun violence and called on Congress to pass a bump stock ban.
“Americans should not have to live in fear of this mass devastation,” Biden said in a statement.
The government moved to classify bump stocks as machine guns following the deadly Route 91 Harvest festival shooting in 2017. A gunman used a bump stock to fire over a thousand bullets — approximately nine rounds per second — at the outdoor concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding 500 more.
The U.S. has restricted machine guns since the 1930s. In 1986, the government barred new machine guns from entering the market, prohibiting any weapon that is designed to automatically fire more than one shot without reloading.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives put spring-loaded bump stocks in this category. Gun manufacturers responded by developing the bump stock at issue in this case, which relies on the shooter’s forward pressure to trigger the device instead of a spring.
Michael Cargill told the court that bump stocks only trigger one shot per function of the trigger, disqualifying them from the language in the 1986 law.
Jonathan Mitchell, an attorney with Mitchell Law representing Cargill, told the justices that the multiple discharges created from the bump stock depended entirely on human effort and exertion. Mitchell said the shooter maintains continuous forward pressure on the barrel of the rifle with the nonshooting hand while also maintaining backward pressure on the weapon with the shooting hand.
The government contested that assessment during oral arguments in February. Brian Fletcher, principal deputy solicitor general at the Department of Justice, said the bump stock was using the gun’s recoil energy to create the continuous back-and-forth cycle that fires hundreds of shots per minute.
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