(Washington) The United States Supreme Court on Friday overturned a federal regulation banning “bump stocks”, a device that increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles, transforming them de facto into machine guns.
By six votes to three, those of the conservative justices against those of the progressives, the Court affirmed that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a federal agency, had exceeded its authority by reclassifying “bump stocks” in 2018 in the category of machine guns, prohibited by a law from 1934, during the Prohibition era.
“We consider a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock not to be a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one round with ‘a single pull of the trigger,’” writes the Judge Clarence Thomas on behalf of the majority, referring to the text of the 1934 law, adopted well before the invention of this device.
The backdrop to this case is the Las Vegas massacre, the worst in modern US history, in which 58 people were killed and more than 500 injured on October 1, 2017. Most of the 22 gunmen in the The perpetrator of this carnage were equipped with these removable stocks and he was thus able to fire at a rate of up to nine bullets per second.
The ATF had begun to review its position on these removable stocks following this tragedy.
In February 2018, a few days after a shooting at a Florida high school in which 17 people died, the administration of then-Republican President Donald Trump pledged to ban “bump stocks.”
In December of the same year, the ATF announced that it would now consider “bump stocks” as machine guns, ordering the holders to destroy them or turn them over to the authorities within 90 days.