What are bump stocks? US Supreme Court lifts Trump's ban on gun accessories

The U.S. Supreme Court has lifted a ban on Bump Stocks, the rapid-fire weapon accessory used in America's deadliest mass shooting.

Bump-stocks, or sliding firing adapters, allow semi-automatic rifles to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, like a machine gun.

But the court said they did not meet the government's definition for machine guns, which are mostly illegal under federal law — with a few exceptions.

The Trump administration banned the devices as machine guns after they were used to kill nearly 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas.

The bump stock is a device added to the stock of a rifle that exploits the gun's recoil or backward movement felt by a person when the bullet is fired.

It replaces the stock of the weapon, which is held against the shoulder, and allows the rest of the rifle to slide back and forth with each shot despite the absence of mechanical parts or springs.

The movement causes the trigger to collide or hit the shooter's finger as long as he applies forward pressure with the non-firing hand and backward pressure with the shooting hand.

It is estimated that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a stock can fire between 400 and 800 rounds per minute, comparable to that of machine guns.

In 2017, a gunman who killed 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas added this accessory to 12 of his semi-automatic rifles.

Protests for stricter gun control measures came from politicians and victims' families in the aftermath of the event.

Another mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, a year later added to calls for reform.

In 2018, President Donald Trump decided to classify stock firearms as machine guns, allowing them to be banned under federal law.

In its ruling, the court said the government had no right to ban wholesale stocks.

The court said a semi-automatic rifle with an accessory is not considered a machine gun under federal law, adding that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms had “exceeded” its authority in banning the device.

The Supreme Court opinion, written by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, highlighted the technical differences between a machine gun and a weapon equipped with a humped stock.

Citing part of the legal definition of machine guns, the court said stock rifles “cannot fire more than one shot 'by a single pull of the trigger,' and even if they could, they would not.” would not 'automatically'”. .

But the decision was split, with three of the nine justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor – dissenting.

In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor warned that the decision to place “relief stocks in civilian hands” would have “deadly consequences.”