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 that killed 60 people and injured hundreds more.
The court’s conservative majority said Friday that then-President Donald Trump’s administration overstepped its authority with the 2019 ban on the firearm attachment, which allows semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns.
Here’s what to know about the case.
What are bump stocks?
Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s stock, the part that gets pressed against the shooter’s shoulder. When a person fires a semiautomatic weapon fitted with a bump stock, it uses the gun’s recoil energy to rapidly and repeatedly bump the trigger against the shooter’s finger.
That allows the weapon to fire dozens of bullets in a matter of seconds.
LISTEN: Supreme Court considers ban on gun bump stocks
Bump stocks were invented in the early 2000s after the expiration of a 1994 ban targeting assault weapons. The federal government approved the sale of bump stocks in 2010 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives concluded that guns equipped with the devices should not be considered illegal machine guns under federal law.
According to court documents, more than 520,000 bump stocks were in circulation by 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 Oct. 1, 2017, when a man opened fire on the crowd from the window of his high-rise hotel room. He fired more than 1,000 rounds in the crowd in 11 minutes, leaving 60 people dead and injuring hundreds more.
Authorities found an arsenal of 23 assault-style rifles in the shooter’s hotel room, including 14 weapons fitted with bump stocks.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the ATF reconsidered whether bump stocks could be sold and owned legally. With support from Trump, a Republican, the agency in 2018 ordered a ban on the devices, arguing they turned rifles into illegal machine guns.
Bump stock owners were given until March 2019 to surrender or destroy them.
What did the justices say?
The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said the ATF did not have the authority to issue the regulation banning bump stocks. The justices said a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot 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 outlaw bump stocks like machine guns. But that has to happen through action by Congress, not through regulation, he wrote.
READ MORE: How bump stocks ended up before the U.S. Supreme Court
The court’s three liberal justices opposed the ruling. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that there’s no common sense difference between a machine gun and a semiautomatic 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.
How immoral is the decision?
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) issued the following statement on the Supreme Court’s ruling in Garland v. Cargill:
“The Supreme Court’s radical decision today to strike down the federal ban on bump stocks will make Americans less safe from gun violence and mass shootings, period.
“Remember, it was President Trump’s own Republican-led ATF that classified these weapons as machine guns in the wake of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history – the horrific 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people and wounded 500 more in just 10 minutes, because the shooter used a bump stock that enabled them to discharge more than 1,000 rounds, firing at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute, converting their gun into a weapon of war.
“It defies logic to say that a bump stock yields anything less than a machine gun. As Justice Sotomayor said in her dissent, ‘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.’
“Elected leaders have the ability to protect Americans from senseless and preventable gun violence tragedies. Congress must act to reverse this ruling, and I urge the Senate to take up legislation to ban bump stocks and protect our communities. We owe it to the victims of Las Vegas and to every community plagued by gun violence to take decisive action now."
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