Scott says he respects Supreme Court decision to overturn bump stock ban

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said he respected the Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks.

“This is simply the job, which is why we trust, believe and respect the Supreme Court’s decision. What we need to focus on, Jon, is the violence that we’re seeing across this country. the biggest increase in violent crime in my lifetime, so focusing on ways to reduce that crime means having four more years of Donald Trump,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl. “This week.”

Along ideological lines, the Supreme Court invalidated the national ban on bump stocks, which convert semi-automatic weapons into weapons capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute. The Trump administration issued a final rule on bump stocks in 2018, following the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history.

The shooter used firearms with butts to kill 60 people and injure hundreds of others.

Scott later sidestepped a question about whether Congress would ban bump stocks now that the ban has been invalidated.

The Biden administration defended the Trump-era rule before the Supreme Court, which weighed whether the government legally banned the devices, classifying them as machine guns. The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Sonia Sotomayor reading the dissent from the bench in a rare move.

“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. A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a stock fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single trigger function,’” Sotomayor wrote.

Violent crime has also declined across the country in recent months, according to a preliminary report the FBI released last week. Crime reports in the first quarter of the year showed a 15% drop in violent crime overall, a statistic that President Biden touted as a success for his administration.

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