The US Court ruled that the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks is unconstitutional.
Washington:
The US Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the ban introduced by former President Donald Trump’s administration on bump stocks – devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire like a machine gun – is unconstitutional.
The case stems from the worst mass shooting in U.S. history in October 2017, when a man shot into a crowd attending an outdoor music concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring about 500.
Most of its 22 guns were equipped with stocks, allowing them to fire up to nine bullets per second.
The court voted along ideological lines, 6-3 in favor of the conservative justices, that the Trump administration did not follow the law after the shooting in extending the ban on machine guns to include bump stocks.
“This case questions whether a bump stock – an accessory for a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to quickly reactivate the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire) – converts the rifle into a ‘machine gun,'” said Judge Clarence . Thomas, writing the opinion for the majority.
“We maintain that this does not happen.”
The National Rifle Association hailed the decision as having “adequately restricted executive branch agencies to their role of enforcing, not making, the law.”
But it sparked protests of outrage from gun control activists and Democrats, with President Joe Biden’s re-election campaign denouncing the court for prioritizing the gun lobby over “the safety of our children.”
“Weapons of war have no place on the streets of America, but Trump’s Supreme Court justices have ruled that the gun lobby is more important than the safety of our children and our communities,” the campaign spokesperson said. , Michael Tyler, in a statement.
Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic minority leader in the House of Representatives, called the decision “dangerous, disastrous and deeply disturbing.”
“The majority of judges today sided with the gun lobby over the safety of the American people,” said Esther Sanchez-Gomez of the gun control group Giffords, posted on X, pointing to polls showing that more than eight in every 10 Americans are in favor of prohibition.
“This is a shameful decision.”
The government first acted on the issue in 2018, following another mass shooting at a Florida high school that left 17 people dead, when the Justice Department under Trump decided to declare the detachable devices illegal.
In December of that year, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) revised its regulations on bump stocks, declaring that they fall within a 1934 law passed by Congress banning machine guns.
– ‘Quacks like a duck’ –
Brian Fletcher, assistant attorney general in President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, told the court when it heard oral arguments in February that bump stocks allow a user to “empty a 100-round magazine like the ones used” in the Las Vegas shooting in about 10 seconds.”
“These weapons do exactly what Congress intended to prohibit when they enacted the ban on machine guns,” Fletcher said.
But lawyers for Michael Cargill, a Texas gun salesman, challenged the measure on the grounds that the ATF had overstepped its bounds by classifying bump stocks as machine guns.
Oral arguments centered on the technical definition of a machine gun in the 1934 law, which was passed during the Prohibition era, long before the stock was invented.
Thomas said that in his opinion, the law defines a machine gun strictly as a weapon capable of firing “automatically more than one shot…by a single trigger function.”
But the decision provoked a sharp dissent from liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.
“Today, the Court returns stocks to civilian hands. To do so, it sets aside Congress’ definition of ‘machine gun’ and seizes on another that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the legal text and is not supported by the context or purpose,” she wrote.
“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.”
(Except the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
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