The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a ban on bump stocks, the rapid-fire gun accessory used in the nation’s deadliest mass shootings.
In Friday’s ruling, the court said the government had no authority to ban the accessories.
In 2017, after a shooting at a concert in Las Vegas that killed 60 people, the Trump administration banned the use of bump stocks.
But a Texas gun store owner who challenged the ban said the government went too far in defining the accessory as a machine gun, which is illegal under federal law, and took his fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The court said semi-automatic rifles with attachments do not qualify as machine guns under federal law.
The Supreme Court opinion, written by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, said the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had “exceeded” its authority.
Citing part of the legal definition of a machine gun, the court said that rifles with concave and convex stocks “cannot fire more than one round ‘by the single function of the trigger,’ and even if they could, they do not ‘automatically’ do so.”
Three of the nine justices, Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, dissented from the split ruling.
“Today, the court put bump stocks back into the hands of civilians,” Judge Sotomayor said.
She said the decision “will have fatal consequences”.
Talking about whether they should be machine guns, she said: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”
In the Firearms Act 1986, a machine gun is defined as any “weapon capable of firing by the single function of the trigger, designed to fire or capable of being readily resumed to fire, and capable of firing a plurality of shots automatically without the need for manual reloading” .
During hearings in the case in March, some justices on the conservative-led court appeared skeptical of the ban, drawing attention to subtle technical differences in the way bumper guns fire compared to machine guns.
At the time, Justice Neil Gorsuch said he could understand “why these items should be made illegal,” but said it was Congress’s job to make it clear.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson countered that bump stocks were only “weapons that Congress intended to ban because of the damage they cause.”
The concave and convex stock uses the recoil of the rifle to fire multiple rounds quickly. It replaces the butt of the weapon against the shoulder and allows the gun to slide back and forth between the user’s shoulder and trigger finger. This movement or collision allows the gun to fire without the user having to move their fingers.
The attacker in the Las Vegas shooting installed bump stocks on 12 of his semi-automatic rifles, allowing him to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, the same rate of fire as many machine guns. He killed 60 people who had gathered for a music festival and wounded hundreds more.
A spokeswoman for Donald Trump’s campaign, whose administration issued the original ban, told the BBC that “the courts have spoken and their decision should be respected.”
A spokesman for President Joe Biden criticized the decision. “Weapons of war have no place on America’s streets,” they said.
