President Joe Biden’s administration asked the United States Supreme Court on Friday to hear its appeal of a lower court ruling against a federal ban on “bump stocks,” which allow semiautomatic weapons to fire like machine guns.
The administration is defending the ban, which was imposed by former President Donald Trump, against a challenge from Michael Cargill, an Austin, Texas-based gun shop owner and gun rights advocate. The ban was a rare firearms control measure in the United States, prompted by the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.
The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans sided with Cargill in January, ruling that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), a U.S. Justice Department agency, improperly reclassified bump stocks as machine guns, which are illegal in the United States.
The decision “threatens significant harm to public safety,” according to the Justice Department’s appeal filed on Friday. “With a single pull of the trigger, a shooter can fire hundreds of bullets per minute.” Rifles modified with bump stocks, like other machine guns, are extremely dangerous.”
The bump stock ban had previously been upheld by three other federal appeals courts. The Supreme Court, which is a major decision last year to expand gun rights, declined to hear those cases.
Bump stocks take advantage of the recoil of a semiautomatic rifle to allow it to slide back and forth while “bumping” the shooter’s trigger finger, resulting in rapid fire.
After a gunman used bump stocks in a 2017 shooting spree at a country music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more, Trump’s administration launched an investigation into their legality.
The ATF reversed a previous conclusion in its 2019 rule and classified bump stocks as machine guns, which are defined under the National Firearms Act of 1934 as weapons that can “automatically” fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.” The sale or possession of machine guns is illegal under federal law and is punishable by up to ten years in prison.
Cargill filed a lawsuit in 2019 to challenge the ATF’s rule requiring him to surrender his two bump stocks. The New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative legal organization, is representing him.
In June 2022, the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision backed by its conservative justices, declared for the first time that the right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense is protected by the United States Constitution.
Two days later, Biden signed the first major federal gun reform bill in three decades into law. The legislation was enacted in the aftermath of mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, which killed more than 30 people, including 19 elementary school children.
In January, a full panel of 5th Circuit judges ruled 13-3 in favor of Cargill but left it up to a trial judge to decide whether to overturn the ATF rule.
