The Supreme Court on Monday again declined to hear a lawsuit involving a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, the gun attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
The justices’ decision not to hear the case leaves in place a lower court decision that rejected bump stock owners’ efforts to be compensated for bump stocks they lawfully purchased, but were required to to give up after the administration ruled they were illegal. Lower courts had said the case should be dismissed.
As is typical, the justices made no comments in declining to hear the case, and it was among many the court rejected Monday.
Last month, the justices rejected two other challenges involving the ban. Gun rights advocates, however, scored a big win at the court earlier this year, when the justices by a 6-3 vote expanded gun-possession rights, weakening states’ ability to limit the carrying of guns in public.
The Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks took effect in 2019 and came about as a result of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. The gunman there used assault-style rifles to fire into the crowd of 22,000 music fans.
Most of the rifles were fitted with bump stock devices and high-capacity magazines. A total of 58 people were killed in the shooting, and two died later. Hundreds were injured.
The Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks was an about-face for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In 2010, under the Obama administration, the agency found that bump stocks should not be classified as a “machinegun” and therefore should not be banned under federal law.
Under the Trump administration, officials revisited that determination and found it incorrect.
(AP)
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One Response
This is annoying. The case is probably not important enough for the Supreme Court to devote its time to it, but the government claim that a bump stock turns a semiautomatic weapon into an automatic one is simply a lie. The weapon is still semiautomatic, so you still only get one bullet out every time you squeeze the trigger. All the bump stock does is let you squeeze the trigger faster; you can train yourself to do the same thing without one, it just takes a lot of practice. Banning it is illegal, but it’s not a huge deal in practical terms, because a bump stock is a useless gadget anyway; the tradeoff for being able to squeeze the trigger faster is that you can’t aim with any accuracy. You can get off a lot of bullets in the general direction where the rifle is pointed, but your chance of actually hitting your target is slim. So it’s a novelty toy, but no serious shooter would ever want to use one for anything that matters.