The United States Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s 2018 ban on bump stocks in a Friday ruling, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing the majority opinion in a 6-3 decision.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) issued the ban at former president Donald Trump’s urging after the gunman who killed 58 people in a 2017 Las Vegas shooting was found to have used bump stocks, which increase a rifle’s rate of fire by using the recoil from a semiautomatic rifle to fire bullets in rapid succession.
The Trump administration argued in 2018 that adding bump stocks to semiautomatic rifles converts them into machine guns, the transfer and possession of which had been outlawed in 1986 with the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act.
In his opinion, Thomas wrote that, though a bump stock does increase a rifle’s rate of fire, it does not turn it into an automatic weapon.
“A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does,” Thomas wrote. “Even with a bump stock, a semiautomatic rifle will only fire one shot for every ‘function of the trigger.'”
Justice Samuel Alito wrote in his concurrence that, while the ATF’s interpretation of the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act was an incorrect reading of the statute, there are legislative remedies for the issue of bump stocks.
“The horrible shooting spree in Las Vegas in 2017 did not change the statutory text or its meaning,” Alito wrote. “That event demonstrated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machinegun, and it thus strengthened the case for amending §5845(b). But an event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the dissenting opinion, arguing that modified semiautomatic rifles are indeed automatic and that the majority’s opinion would hamper “the government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.”