How SCOTUS Stock Reversal Affects Gun Control in the United States

FILE – A bump stock is on display March 15, 2019 in Harrisonburg, Virginia. A Trump administration ban on bump stocks, devices that allow a shooter to quickly fire multiple rounds with semiautomatic weapons after an initial pull of the trigger, has been reversed. Friday, January 6, 2023, by a federal appeals court in New Orleans. (AP Photo/Steve Helber, file)

NewsNation ) — Long before Friday's Supreme Court ruling overturned the ban on bump stocks, the U.S. government concluded that accessories for semi-automatic rifles, which have become controversial in recent years, were not safe. the height of transforming weapons into machine guns.

However, the court's 6-3 decision overturning the 2019 ban, which won the support of former President Donald Trump, comes at a time when the United States is still struggling to cope with gun violence, including multiple incidents in which assault-style weapons were used. used.

Yet while Congress has been slow to address issues related to gun control, the nation's highest court has changed course on an issue that ultimately came down to how much authority the government should have.

In this case, it's a question of whether bump stocks turn semi-automatic weapons into something illegal.

“He cannot fire more than one shot 'by a single trigger pull,' and even if he could, he would not do so 'automatically,'” Supreme Court Justice Clarence wrote in the decision. majority.

What is a bump stock?

The bump stocks were created in the early 2000s after the assault weapons ban expired in 1994.

The accessory “bumps” between the shooter's shoulder and uses the recoil energy of the rifle to rapidly and repeatedly bump the trigger against the shooter's index finger. The stock allows the weapon to fire dozens of bullets in seconds, much like a machine gun.

Congress banned machine guns under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and defined them as weapons that fire, are designed to fire, or can be easily restored to automatically fire more than one round without manually reloading by a single firing function. the trigger.

In 1968, the law was expanded to include any parts that could be attached to a weapon to turn it into a machine gun.

What led to the ban on high volume stocks?

More than 520,000 replacement stocks were in circulation when Washington lawmakers enacted the device ban in 2020, according to court documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

The sale of safety stocks was approved in 2010 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that semi-automatic rifles equipped with safety stocks should not be considered safety stocks. illegal machine guns as defined in federal law.

However, after a gunman opened fire on a crowd attending a country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, killing 60 people and injuring 850 others using weapons – some of which included stockpiles of shock – lawmakers began considering reversing the government's initial decision.

During this shooting, law enforcement discovered 23 assault-style weapons in the shooter's hotel room, including 14 equipped with safety stocks. Police concluded that the gunman, who committed suicide after the shooting, fired more than 1,000 rounds into the crowd in less than 11 minutes.

A year later, following an investigation into the shooting by ATF officials, the federal agency, backed by Trump, ordered that the bump stocks be considered illegal.

Under the ban, stock owners had until March 2019 to either return the devices or have them destroyed.

Why SCOTUS considered bump stocks?

Based on a lawsuit filed by Texas gun store owner Michael Cargill, the group New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a lawsuit challenging the ban.

The suit argued that federal officials did not have the authority to ban the devices. Although the complaint did not address the Second Amendment rights of gun-owning Americans, it questioned the government's authority to ban the devices if it did not turn the rifle into a machine gun.

In February, during oral arguments before the Supreme Court to consider overturning the Trump-era ban, the debate centered on whether bump stocks turned these weapons into actual machine guns.

At the time, judges struggled to understand how a shock stock worked and how it allowed the weapon to fire faster, the New York Times reported.

The Status of Other Gun Laws

Friday's decision comes at a time when Congress has been slow to address gun control at the federal level. However, legal experts said the Supreme Court's decision on bump stocks could impact other gun measures across the country.

The 2019 ban on bump stocks was one of the few restrictions on gun control in recent years and came months after the Supreme Court refused to consider a measure to overturn the ban Assault Weapons Act, which was signed into law after a shooter opened fire at a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois, which left seven people dead.

Across the country, several new state laws – including banning concealed carry in parts of California, extending waiting periods for gun purchases in Washington, and banning weapons ghosts in Colorado – enacted new gun laws in 2024.

The laws were passed at the same time after a major ghost gun manufacturer agreed to stop selling the guns in Maryland as part of a settlement agreement. The deal was reached after Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said nine out of 10 homicides in Baltimore were committed with guns.

Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, gun manufacturers are producing less-lethal weapons designed to provide people with self-defense tools that are not considered dangerous.

“It looks like a gun. It works like a gun. It looks like a gun,” Bryan Ganz, the creator of the Bryna Launcher, told NewsNation. “It just doesn’t kill people like a gun.”

He described the weapon as a “paintball gun on steroids.”