6-3 with the 3 dissenters being exactly who you think they’d be.
Bump Stock Ban Tossed Out by Supreme Court in Gun-Rights Win
A divided US Supreme Court dealt a fresh blow to firearm-regulation efforts by throwing out the federal ban on bump stocks, the attachments that let a semiautomatic rifle fire at speeds rivaling a machine gun.
On a 6-3 vote along ideological lines, the justices voided a criminal prohibition put in place by the Trump administration after the 2017 Las Vegas concert massacre, when a man using bump stocks killed 60 people. The attack was the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.
The case is one of two firearms disputes the court is considering in its 2023-24 term, along with a constitutional clash over the federal gun ban for people subject to domestic-violence restraining orders. The bump-stock fight concerned the reach of a federal statute rather than the Second Amendment, the constitutional provision the court has used to expand gun rights in recent years.
A 1986 law bars most people from owning fully automatic machine guns or parts designed to convert weapons into machine guns. The issue was whether bump stocks meet the law’s definition of machine guns as weapons that can “automatically” discharge more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.”
“A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court majority.
Bump stocks replace the standard stock on a rifle — the part that rests against the shooter’s shoulder — with a plastic casing that lets the weapon slide forward and backward. The device harnesses the recoil energy when a shot is fired, causing the gun to slide backward and separate from the trigger finger. The separation lets the firing mechanism reset.
By applying constant forward pressure with the non-trigger hand, the shooter can then force the rifle forward so that it “bumps” the trigger finger, even without moving the finger.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“The majority’s artificially narrow definition hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter,” Sotomayor wrote for the group. She took the unusual step of reading a summary of her dissent from the bench for emphasis.
The case is Garland v. Cargill, 22-976.