WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. Supreme Court overturned a ban in bump stocks, the gun accessory used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history – a massacre in Las Vegas that killed 60 people and injured hundreds more.
The court’s conservative majority said Friday that then-President Donald Trump’s administration overstepped its authority with the 2019 ban on the attachment of firearmswhich allows semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns.
Here’s what you should know about the case:
What are bump stocks?
Stocks are accessories that replace the rifle butt, the part that is pressed against the shooter’s shoulder. When a person fires a semiautomatic weapon equipped with a buttstock, he or she uses the weapon’s recoil energy to rapidly and repeatedly slam the trigger against the shooter’s finger.
This allows the gun 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 on assault weapons. The federal government approved the sale of bump stocks in 2010 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concluded that weapons 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 when the government reversed course and imposed a ban that took effect in 2019.
Why were bump stocks banned?
More than 22,000 people were attending a country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, when a man opened fire on the crowd through the window of his high-rise hotel room. He fired more than 1,000 shots into the crowd in 11 minutes, leaving 60 dead and hundreds injured.
Authorities found an arsenal of 23 assault rifles in the shooter’s hotel room, including 14 weapons equipped with buttstocks.
After the shooting, the ATF reconsidered whether bump stocks could be legally sold and owned. With the support of Trump, a Republican, the agency in 2018 ordered a ban on the devices, arguing that they turned rifles into illegal machine guns.
Owners of special shares had until March 2019 to hand them over or destroy them.
What did the judges say?
The 6-3 majority opinion written by Judge Clarence Thomas said the ATF did not have the authority to issue the regulation banning bump stocks. The judges said a stock is not an illegal machine gun because it does not cause the weapon to 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 ban bump stocks like machine guns. But that has to happen through congressional action, not regulation, he wrote.
The court’s three liberal justices opposed the ruling. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that there is no common sense difference between a machine gun and a semi-automatic firearm with a stock.
“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,” she wrote.
Do any states have their own bans?
At least 15 states and the District of Columbia have their own bump stock bans, although some may be affected by the high court ruling.
Most state laws, however, remain in effect because the ruling covered the ATF rule, not the constitutionality of state-level bans, according to David Pucino, legal director at the gun control think tank Giffords.
Who defied the ban?
A group called the New Alliance for Civil Liberties filed a lawsuit to challenge the stock ban on behalf of Michael Cargill, a gun store owner in Texas. Cargill purchased two bump stocks in 2018 and then turned them over once the federal ban took effect, according to court documents.
The case did not directly address gun owners’ Second Amendment rights. Instead, Cargill’s lawyers argued that the ATF overstepped its authority by banning bump stocks. Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Alliance for Civil Liberties, said his group would not have sued if Congress had banned them by law.
How did the case end up at the Supreme Court?
The Supreme Court took up the case after lower federal courts handed down 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 New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned bump stock ban when it ruled in the Texas case last year. The court majority in the 13-3 decision concluded that “a plain reading of the statutory language” showed that weapons equipped with buttstocks could not be regulated as machine guns.
