The Supreme Court has struck down a federal ban on “bump stocks,” a firearm accessory that allows semi-automatic rifles to fire more quickly than with a standard stock.
The legality of bump stocks garnered renewed scrutiny in 2017, after a gunman used one to shoot and and kill 60 people — and injured more than 400 others — during a mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada.
The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday that the 1934 National Firearms Act’s ban on the public sale of fully automatic weapons, or machine guns, cannot be interpreted to cover a ban on the use of bump stocks. The court’s six conservatives ruled to overturn the bump-stock ban, while its three liberal justices dissented.
“Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion. “To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of ‘machinegun’ and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose. 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. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.”
The federal ban on bump stocks was implemented under the administration of former President Donald Trump. In 2018, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) clarified that the National Firearms Act supported a ban on bump stocks. The rule change was challenged in 2019 by a firearms dealer in Texas. Eighteen states have implemented their own bans on the sale of the firearm accessories.
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
