Supreme Court Overturns Federal Bump Stock Ban In Blow To Gun Reformers

The Supreme Court Friday overturned a federal agency’s rule banning bump stocks, the devices used in some of America’s deadliest mass killings carried out by lone shooters.

Plaintiff Michael Cargill, an Austin, Texas, gun store owner, did not claim that the Second Amendment protected his right to own a bump stock. The case focused narrowly on the administrative process by which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) banned bump stocks, which harness a firearm’s recoil to achieve rates of firing that approach those of automatic weapons.

But the ruling in Garland v. Cargill deals a heavy blow to gun reformers, who viewed a ban on bump stocks as a commonsense response to the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017, when a single shooter fired more than 1,000 rounds into a concert crowd, killing 60 people and injuring 850 more.

After the shooting, a broad consensus formed that bump stocks, a small segment of the overall firearms industry, should be banned.

Congress, however, did not move swiftly to ban bump stocks in the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting. Instead, then-President Donald Trump directed the ATF to restrict the devices.

The bureau issued a rule in 2018 reclassifying bump stocks as machine guns, making them illegal for civilians to own under federal law.

The new Supreme Court ruling clarifies that Congress would have to impose the bump stock ban in order to remove the devices from the market.