Scott says he respects Supreme Court decision to overturn ban on bump stocks

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

“The job is simply this, so we trust and believe and respect the decision of the Supreme Court. What we need to focus on, Jon, is the violence that we’re seeing across this nation. Under Joe Biden, we’ve seen the greatest increase in violent crime in my lifetime. So focusing on ways for us to reduce that crime means getting four more years of Donald Trump,” he told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on “This Week.”

Along ideological lines, the Supreme Court invalidated the national ban on bump stocks, which convert semiautomatic weapons to ones 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 gunman had used firearms with a bump stock to kill 60 people and wound hundreds of others.

Scott later dodged a question about whether Congress would move to ban bump stocks now that the prohibition has been invalidated.

The Biden administration defended the Trump-era rule before the Supreme Court, which weighed whether the government lawfully prohibited the devices by 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 bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger,’” Sotomayor wrote. 

Violent crime has also been down nationwide in recent months, according to a preliminary report the FBI released last week. Crime reporting for the first quarter of the year showed a 15 percent drop in violent crime overall, a statistic that President Biden touted as a success of his administration.