Supreme Court to weigh Trump-era bump stock ban

The Supreme Court will decide whether to uphold a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, devices that convert semi-automatic weapons to fire more rapidly, the court announced Friday.

The Trump administration imposed the rule after a gunman using a bump stock killed roughly 60 people and wounded hundreds of others attending a 2017 music festival on the Las Vegas Strip. It remains the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

Federal officials estimate that up to 520,000 bump stocks were sold nationwide before owners were ordered to surrender them.

The conservative-majority Supreme Court on multiple previous occasions refused to disturb lower rulings about the devices. But with a growing split among the nation’s courts on the issue, the justices in a brief, unsigned order agreed to take up a Biden administration appeal defending the rule. 

The case is slated to be heard this term, with a ruling expected by the end of June.  

It only elevates the issue of guns at the Supreme Court, which was already on the justices’ docket.

Next week, the justices will hear arguments about whether a federal gun possession ban for people under domestic-violence restraining orders is constitutional. Court watchers are closely eying that case to see whether the conservative majority adjusts its landmark ruling last year that issued the biggest expansion of Second Amendment rights in a decade.

The bump stock case, however, does not directly implicate the Second Amendment. 

It instead concerns whether the Trump-era Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) could regulate bump stocks by deeming them “machineguns,” as defined under federal law.

Congress has long banned the transfer and possession of “machineguns,” and the case turns on whether bump-stock-equipped rifles meet the definition of firing “automatically more than one shot … by a single function of the trigger.”

“The interpretive rule did not alter or enlarge the scope of the statutory prohibition on possessing or transferring new machineguns,” the Justice Department wrote in court filings. “The rule instead merely served to inform the public of ATF’s considered view that bump stocks are ‘machineguns’ as Congress defined that term.”

A coalition of gun control groups, including Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, backed the administration’s request and urged the Supreme Court to uphold the bump stock ban.

Michael Cargill, who filed the underlying lawsuit after surrendering his two bump stocks to comply with the rule, also supported the Supreme Court taking the case.

But Cargill insists that bump stocks can’t be considered machineguns, arguing the Justice Department is “overlooking the considerable human input required to fire more than one shot from a bump-stock-equipped semi-automatic rifle.”

“[T]he meaning of ‘machinegun’ in section 5845(b) is an issue on which national uniformity is needed; it is not tenable to have a regime in which the sale and possession of bump stocks are outlawed in some circuits while permitted in others,” Cargill’s attorneys wrote in court filings.