The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the government overstepped its authority when it banned bump stocks, a gun accessory that transforms a semiautomatic rifle into a firearm that functions similarly to a machine gun.
The high court ruled 6 to 3 along ideological lines in favor of Michael Cargill, a gun store owner who challenged the ban.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion, stating that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was wrong to classify bump stocks as machine guns, which, by statute, made the devices illegal to own.
“A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,” Thomas wrote, citing the language in the statute. “With or without a bump stock, a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot.”
The Trump administration made the regulatory change to bump stocks in 2018, which effectively banned them. The move came in response to the Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, which killed 58 people and wounded hundreds of others the prior year. The suspect used bump stocks when he fired into a crowd of thousands who were attending a concert.
The decision is a win for Second Amendment advocates, such as the National Rifle Association, which accused the ATF of attempting to write legislation instead of enforcing it.
Cargill, the plaintiff in the case who brought the initial lawsuit against Attorney General Merrick Garland, celebrated his victory in a video statement on X.
“The bump stock case is going to be the case that saves everything,” Cargill said, saying it would prevent the ATF from “coming after your brace, your triggers, all different parts and pieces that they’re trying to ban.”
Everytown, a prominent gun control organization, responded to the decision by calling on Congress to “right this deadly wrong.”
“The Supreme Court has put countless lives in danger,” the group said in a statement. “Congress can and should right this deadly wrong by passing bipartisan legislation to ban bump stocks that has already been introduced in the House and Senate.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor read the court’s dissenting opinion from the bench.
“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” Sotomayor wrote.
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She observed that a bump stock on a semiautomatic rifle requires pulling a trigger once to fire multiple shots.
“Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent,” she wrote.
