Washington.- The Supreme Court this Friday overturned a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, the accessories for rapid-fire firearms used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history, in a ruling that again put to firearms at the center of the country’s political attention.
The high court’s conservative majority considered that the Trump administration overstepped its bounds by changing course from its predecessors and banning bump stocks, which allow a rate of fire comparable to that of machine guns. The decision came after a gunman attacked a country music festival in Las Vegas with semi-automatic rifles equipped with these accessories.
The gunman fired more than a thousand projectiles into the crowd in 11 minutes, causing thousands of people to flee in terror, hundreds injured and dozens dead.
The ruling returned guns to the center of the political conversation with an unusual twist, as Democrats denounced the reversal of a Republican administration measure and many Republicans supported the ruling.
The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas found that the Justice Department erred in declaring that bump stocks transformed semiautomatic rifles into illegal machine guns because, he wrote, each pull of the trigger in rapid succession only releases one shot.
The ruling reinforced the limits of executive reach, and two justices — conservative Samuel Alito and liberal Sonia Sotomayor — separately highlighted how action in Congress could potentially provide more lasting policy, if there was political will to act in a bipartisan manner.
Originally imposing a ban through regulation rather than legislation during Donald Trump’s presidency took pressure off Republicans to act following the massacre and another mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. The prospects for passing gun restrictions in the current divided Congress are slim.
President Joe Biden, who supports gun restrictions, called on Congress to reinstate the ban imposed under his political enemy. Trump’s campaign team, for its part, expressed respect for the ruling before quickly referring to his support of the National Rifle Association.
As Trump courts gun owners as he runs to regain the presidency, he has appeared to downplay his own administration’s actions on bump stocks, telling NRA members in February that “nothing happened” on guns. during his presidency despite “great pressure.” He told the group that if he is elected again, “nobody will lay a finger on your guns.”
The 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas was carried out by a high-stakes gambler who committed suicide, leaving his exact motive a mystery. A total of 60 people died in the shooting, including Christiana Duarte, whose family described Friday’s ruling as tragic.
“The sentencing is really another way of inviting people to another mass shooting,” said family friend and spokeswoman Danette Meyers. “It’s unfortunate that they have to relive this again. They are really unhappy.”
The ruling comes after the same conservative Supreme Court supermajority handed down a landmark decision that expanded gun rights in 2022. The high court is also expected to rule in another gun case in the coming weeks, challenging a law federal law aimed at keeping guns away from people under domestic violence restraining orders.
However, the arguments in the bump stocks case focused less on Second Amendment rights than on whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, an agency of the Justice Department, had overstepped its bounds. its functions.
Bump stocks are accessories that replace the stock of a rifle, the part that rests on the shoulder. Invented in the 2000s, they harness the weapon’s recoil energy to cause the trigger to strike against the shooter’s stationary finger, allowing the weapon to fire at a rate similar to that of an automatic weapon.
The majority of the Supreme Court found that the 1934 law against machine guns defined them as weapons that could automatically fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger. Bump stocks do not fit that definition because “the trigger must be released and pulled again to fire each additional shot,” Thomas wrote. He also pointed to more than a decade of ATF findings stating that bump stocks were not automatic weapons.
The plaintiff, Texas gun store owner and military veteran Michael Cargill, applauded the ruling in a video posted online, predicting that the case would have ripple effects by hindering other ATF gun restrictions. “I’m glad I fought,” he said.
In a dissenting opinion joined by her liberal colleagues, Justice Sotomayor said that bump stocks fit within the ordinary meaning of the law: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck “I call it duck,” he wrote. The ruling, she said, could hamper the ATF and have “deadly consequences.”
ATF Director Steve Dettelbach echoed the sentiment, stating that bump stocks “pose an unacceptable level of risk to public safety.”
The high court took up the case after a split between lower courts. Under the presidency of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the ATF decided that bump stocks did not convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns. The agency reversed those decisions at Trump’s urging. That was after the Las Vegas massacre and the Parkland, Florida, shooting, which left 17 dead.
Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump stocks that are not expected to be affected by the ruling, although four state bans can no longer cover bump stocks in the wake of the ruling, according to the gun control group Everytown .
Cargill was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group funded by conservative donors like the Koch network. His attorneys acknowledged that bump stocks allow rapid firing, but argued that they are different because the shooter has to make greater effort to keep the gun firing.
The Biden administration had argued that the effort was minimal, and said the ATF came to the correct conclusion about bump stocks after further examination spurred by the Las Vegas shooting.
There were about 520,000 bump stocks in circulation when the ban went into effect in 2019, forcing people to hand them over or destroy them for a combined loss estimated at $100 million, the plaintiffs said in court papers.
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