What You Need to Know About Wholesale Stocks After Supreme Court Ruling

WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a ban on bump stocks, the gun accessory used in the deadliest shooting in modern American history — a Las Vegas massacre which killed 60 people and injured hundreds more.

The court's conservative majority said Friday that then-President Donald Trump's administration overstepped its authority by banning gun accessories, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns, in 2019.

Here's what you need to know about the case:

What are bump stocks?

Protective stocks are accessories that replace a rifle's stock, the part that is pressed against the shooter's shoulder. When a person fires a semiautomatic weapon equipped with a striker-fired stock, he or she uses the recoil energy of the weapon to rapidly and repeatedly bang the trigger against the shooter's finger.

This allows the weapon to fire dozens of bullets in a matter of seconds.

Bump stocks were invented in the early 2000s, after a 1994 ban targeting assault weapons expired. The federal government approved the sale of bump stocks in 2010 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concluded that weapons equipped with these devices should not be considered illegal machine guns under federal law.

According to court documents, more than 520,000 bump stocks were in circulation at the time the government reversed course and imposed a ban that took effect in 2019.

Why were bump stocks banned?

More than 22,000 people were attending a country music festival in Las Vegas on October 1, 2017, when a man opened fire on the crowd from his hotel room window. He fired more than 1,000 bullets into the crowd in 11 minutes, killing 60 people and wounding hundreds.

Authorities found an arsenal of 23 assault rifles in the shooter's hotel room, including 14 weapons equipped with shock stocks.

Following the shooting, the ATF reconsidered whether bump stocks could be sold and held legally. With the support of Republican Trump, the agency in 2018 ordered a ban on these devices, arguing that they transformed the rifles into illegal machine guns.

Owners of replacement shares had until March 2019 to return or destroy them.

What did the judges say?

The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said the ATF did not have the authority to issue a regulation prohibiting bump stocks. The judges said a humped stock is not an illegal machine gun because it does not allow the weapon to fire more than one round with a single pull of the trigger.

Justice Samuel Alito, who joined the majority, wrote in a separate opinion that the Las Vegas shooting strengthened the case for changing the law to ban bump stocks like machine guns. But this must be done through congressional action, not regulation, he wrote.

The court's three liberal justices opposed the decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that there is no common sense difference between a machine gun and a semi-automatic firearm with a bump stock.

“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,” she wrote.

Do some states have their own bans?

At least 15 states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on wholesale stocks, although some could be affected by the high court's ruling.

However, most state laws remain in effect because the decision focused on the ATF rule, not the constitutionality of state-level bans, according to David Pucino, legal director of the gun control think tank Giffords.

Pennsylvania does not prohibit wholesale stocks.

Who challenged the ban?

A group called the New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a lawsuit challenging the bump stocks ban on behalf of Michael Cargill, a gun store owner in Texas. Cargill purchased two high-volume stocks in 2018, then returned them once the federal ban took effect, according to court documents.

The case did not directly concern gun owners' Second Amendment rights. Instead, Cargill's lawyers argued that the ATF overstepped its authority in banning replacement stock. Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, said his group would not have filed the lawsuits if Congress had banned them by law.

How did the case end up before the Supreme Court?

The Supreme Court took up the case after lower federal courts issued conflicting rulings on whether the ATF could ban bull stocks.

The ban has survived challenges in the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, the Denver-based 10th Circuit and the Federal Circuit Court in Washington.

But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, based in New Orleans, struck down the ban on bump stocks when it ruled last year in the Texas case. The court's majority in the 13-3 decision held that “a simple reading of the statutory text” showed that weapons equipped with shock stocks could not be regulated as machine guns.