Supreme Court strikes down federal ban on wholesale stocks – NBC4 Washington

Lina Portman3 weeks ago

0 3 minutes read

The Supreme Court's conservative majority struck down a Trump-era ban on Bump Stocks, gun accessories that allow semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns, saying it violates federal law.

The new case is not about the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms,” but rather whether the Trump administration followed federal law in changing the wholesale stockpile regulations.

The Trump administration imposed the ban after the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017. Many weapons were equipped with bump stocks and high-capacity magazines. More than 1,000 bullets were fired into the crowd in 11 minutes, killing nearly 60 people and injuring hundreds more.

Gun rights groups challenged the regulation defining a bump stock as an illegal machine gun under federal law. A lawsuit filed by a Texas gun store owner argues that bump stocks don't change the primary function of a semi-automatic weapon enough to make it illegal. The Biden administration says bump stocks clearly fall under the legal definition of machine gun.

The court's six conservative justices ruled Thursday that replacement stocks do not allow the rifles to be converted into machine guns.

Thomas' opinion, writing for the majority, explains that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a humped stock is not a “machine gun” because it does not fire more than one round “per a single trigger function” as required by law. The high court ruled that the Trump administration failed to follow federal law when it reversed course and banned wholesale stocks.

Liberal Justices Sonya Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. They view the majority's definition as “artificially narrow” and fear it will “cripple government efforts to keep machine guns within the reach of gunmen, like the Las Vegas shooter.”

“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 in his dissenting opinion.

Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock had at least 12 “safety stocks” attached to his weapons, allowing him to fire his weapons at the rate of a machine gun. Lawmakers are now calling for them to be banned. Here's how these devices work.

Protective stocks are accessories that replace a rifle's stock, the part that rests against the shoulder. They harness the recoil energy of the weapon so that the trigger hits the shooter's stationary finger, allowing the weapon to fire quickly.

They were invented in the early 2000s. Under Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives decided that replacement stocks did not transform not semi-automatic weapons in machine guns. The agency reversed that decision at Trump's request after the Las Vegas shooting and another mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead.

The plaintiffs argued that stock rifles are different from machine guns because the trigger continues to move and the shooter must continue to exert pressure on the weapon.

Government lawyers pointed out that traditional machine guns also require pressure from the shooter. They argued that the stocks fell under the legal definition of machine guns because the shooter's finger remained still while the weapon fired hundreds of rounds per minute.

Brian Fletcher, principal deputy solicitor general, said the ATF's previous findings were less thorough than the review it undertook under Trump.

There were about 520,000 relief stocks in circulation when the ban took effect in 2019, forcing people to return or destroy them, for an estimated combined loss of $100 million, the plaintiffs said in filings. court documents.

During oral arguments earlier this year, conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned the Justice Department about the effects of the about-face on the millions of people who bought wholesale stocks when they were legal. Fletcher responded that the Justice Department did not intend to prosecute people who surrendered their wholesale inventory under the new rule, although he later indicated that people who purchased them after finalization of the rule could potentially be subject to litigation.

Bump stocks are banned in these states

Of the 50 states, 15 have laws banning bulk stocks. Each state defines these devices differently but all recognize the danger and threat to public safety.

The District of Columbia also bans wholesale stocks.

Here are the 15 states with bans: