Rick Bowmer/AP/File
In this October 2017 photo, a stock is attached to a semi-automatic rifle.
CNN
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The Supreme Court has agreed to accept a challenge to a federal ban on bump stocks, devices that essentially allow shooters to fire semiautomatic rifles faster, potentially firing hundreds of rounds per minute.
Federal appeals courts have split on the legality of the ban.
The decision to try the case comes as the country is still reeling from the latest mass killing and days before justices prepare to reconsider a landmark Second Amendment ruling from 2022 that expanded gun rights nationwide.
Under then-President Donald Trump, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives banned bump stock devices in 2019 and ordered people who had the devices to destroy them or turn them in to an ATF office. Trump had ordered a review of the devices after a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which a gunman armed with semi-automatic weapons and tracking devices opened fire from his hotel suite on outdoor concerts, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds more .
The challenge is whether the ATF exceeded its authority in 2018 by reclassifying bump stocks as “handguns” under the National Firearms Act. Under federal law, a “machine gun” is defined as “any weapon that fires, is designed to fire, or can be easily restored to fire, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single operation of the trigger.”
The challengers characterized their appeal as a separation of powers dispute, arguing that the agency lacked the authority to issue such a rule banning the devices, that bump stocks do not fall within the legal definition of “gun” and that at the very least the law is ambiguous.
The Biden administration petitioned the Supreme Court asking the justices to accept an appeal, noting that some appeals courts had rejected challenges to the rule.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued that bump stocks fall within the definition of a machine gun because “when the shooter maintains steady forward pressure on the stock or foregrip of the weapon, the weapon slides back along the forearm, causing the trigger to hit the still shooter’s finger and fire another bullet.”
The dispute arose when Michael Cargill bought high-end stocks in April 2018. After the ATF adopted its final rule, Cargill turned over the devices, but challenged the rule by filing a lawsuit in the Western District of Texas. A conservative federal appeals court, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, concluded that the ATF had acted illegally because the legal definition of “machine gun” does not include bump stocks.
Cargill’s lawyers say it will never get its shares back, but that by the government’s own estimate, Americans had bought 52,000 bump shares during a nine-year period when the ATF had barred them from institutional definition of “machine gun”.
“ATF acknowledges that the anticipated property loss will exceed $100 million,” a Cargill attorney argued in court documents.
Although the district court and a panel of judges in the Fifth Circuit ruled in favor of the government, a larger panel of judges on the appeals court issued a split opinion and overturned it on January 6, 2023.
“A plain reading of the statutory language, combined with a close examination of the mechanics of a semiautomatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of a machine gun set forth in the Gun Control Act and the National Firearms Act.” said several of the judges. In the end, the majority of the court held that because the statute was ambiguous, the court would find in Cargill’s favor.
This story is breaking and will be updated.