standard
Conservative bloc
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Alito – Majority
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Barrett – Majority
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Gorsuch – Majority
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Kavanaugh – Majority
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Roberts – Majority
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Tomás – Majority
liberal bloc
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Jackson – Minority
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Kagan – Minority
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Sotomayor – Minority
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on “bump stocks,” the devices that can transform semiautomatic firearms to discharge ammunition almost as quickly as machine guns and that have been the source of some of the most devastating mass shootings in recent history .
The decision was six to three, with the court’s liberal justices disagreeing with the conservative majority’s ruling. Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said a semiautomatic firearm equipped with a stock did not meet the definition of a machine gun, which is subject to stricter regulations.
High court ruling in Garland v Cargill overturns Trump administration decision 2018 Regulation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), which ordered anyone in possession of a bump stock to destroy it or turn it over to federal agents. The rule was passed after the devastating 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival, in which a gunman fired more than 1,000 shots, killing 60 people and injuring nearly 500 others.
After the ban, Michael Cargill, a U.S. Army veteran who owned a gun store in Austin, Texas, gave up several stocks he owned. He then challenged the regulation before the Supreme Court.
In his concurring opinion, conservative Justice Samuel Alito argued that the Las Vegas shooting “did not alter 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 therefore strengthened the case for changing [the law on machine guns],” Alito wrote. “But an event that highlights the need to change a law does not in itself change the meaning of the law.”
In her scathing dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor accused her conservative colleagues of ignoring the ability of bump stocks to transform semi-automatic firearms into much more powerful and deadly weapons.
“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 round, without manual reloading, by a single trigger function’… Why I, like Congress, call it a machine gun, I respectfully disagree.”
Ending the ban will dishearten gun safety organizations like Sandy Hook Promise, who warned that bump stocks make weapons even more deadly, allowing multiple shots to be fired every second with just one pull of the trigger. Public backlash was so strong after the Las Vegas disaster that even the National Rifle Association, a body famous for opposing gun regulations, joined the call for the add-ons to be taken out of circulation.
“Guns equipped with buttstocks shoot like machine guns, kill like machine guns, and should be banned like machine guns – but the Supreme Court decided to put these deadly devices back on the market,” said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. for gun safety. “We urge Congress to right this wrong and pass bipartisan legislation that bans bump stocks, which are accessories of war that have no place in our communities.”
But with a Republican-controlled House, passage of a bill banning bump stocks seems unlikely at this point.
