Alito: Congress may act on collision after Supreme Court lifts Trump-era ban

Justice Samuel Alito said Friday that Congress could change the law to successfully ban bump stocks, in an opinion that echoes the Supreme Court’s decision Friday to invalidate the ban on the Trump-era devices.

The ban on bump stocks, which convert semi-automatic weapons to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, was implemented by the Trump administration following the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, where a shooter used a bump stock to kill a total of 60 people. people and injured hundreds of others — the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

The Biden administration later defended the regulation, which was challenged in 2019, before the high court. Both administrations made possession of the devices a crime by classifying them as machine guns under a long-standing federal law.

Alito, in his opinion, wrote that he agreed the ban should be lifted “because there is simply no other way to read the legal language.” However, he acknowledged that the Congress that passed the law banning machine guns in 1934 would not have seen “any material difference” between a machine gun and a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a stock.

“The horrific spate of shootings in Las Vegas in 2017 did not change the legal text or its meaning. This event demonstrated that a semi-automatic rifle with a stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun and thus strengthened the case for amending § 5845(b),” Alito wrote. “But an event that highlights the need to change a law does not in itself change the meaning of the law.

“There is a simple solution to the unequal treatment of bump stocks and machine guns,” he continued. “Congress can change the law – and perhaps would have already done so if the ATF had stuck to its previous interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines that classifying bump stocks as machine guns is an impermissible reading of the law. Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas authored the majority opinion.

The liberal justices of the high court, in an opinion authored by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, vehemently opposed the majority decision.

“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,” Sotomayor wrote. “A semi-automatic rifle equipped with a stock fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single trigger function.’ Because I, like Congress, call it a machine gun, I respectfully disagree.”

An Austin-based gun store owner originally challenged the ban after turning in two bump stocks in 2019. The National Rifle Association and other major pro-gun groups supported his effort.

The case did not touch on Second Amendment rights, instead questioning whether the Trump administration – through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) – overstretched the legal definition of machine guns to cover bump stocks.

This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story