US Supreme Court throws out ban on bump stocks for guns

[Pelican Press 0]

US Supreme Court throws out ban on bump stocks for guns

The US Supreme Court has lifted a ban bump stocks, the rapid-***** **** accessory used in America’s deadliest mass *********.

In a decision on Friday, the court said the government did not have the right to ban the accessories.

The Trump administration banned bump stocks after they were used in a ********* that ******* 60 people at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017.

But a Texas **** shop owner who challenged the ban said the government went too far in defining the accessories as machine guns, which are ******** under federal law, and took his ****** all the way to America’s highest court.

The court said a semi-automatic rifle with an attachment does not qualify as a machine **** under federal law.

The Supreme Court’s opinion, written by ************* Justice Clarence Thomas, said the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms had “exceeded” its authority.

The court, quoting part of the legal definition of machine guns, said rifles with a bump stock “cannot ***** more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger’, and even if they could, they would not do so ‘automatically'”.

The split decision saw three of the nine justices dissent – they were Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Justice Sotomayor said: “Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands.”

A decision which she said “will have deadly consequences”.

Referencing whether they should qualify as machine guns, she said: “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.”

In the 1986 Firearms Act, machine guns are defined as any “******* which shoots, is designed to ******, or can be readily restored to ******, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger”.

During a hearing on the case in March, some justices on the *************-led court appeared sceptical of the ban, drawing attention to the minor technical differences of how a bump-stock **** fires compared to a machine ****.

At the time, Justice Neil Gorsuch said he could understand “why these items should be made ********” but said that doing so explicitly was Congress’s role.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson countered, saying bump stocks are just “the kinds of weapons Congress was intending to bar because of the damage they do”.

The bump stock harnesses a rifle’s recoil to rapidly ***** multiple rounds. It replaces the *******’s stock, which is held against the shoulder, and allows the **** to slide back and forward between the user’s shoulder and trigger finger. That motion – or bump – lets the **** ***** without the user having to move their finger.

The attacker in the Las Vegas ********* had attached bump stocks to 12 of his semi-automatic rifles which allowed him to ***** hundreds of rounds per minute, the same rate as many machine guns. He ******* 60 people and wounded hundreds more who had gathered for a music festival.

A spokeswomen for Donald Trump’s campaign, whose administration enacted the original ban, told the BBC that “the court has spoken and their decision should be respected”.

A spokesman for President Joe Biden, who is scheduled to debate Trump in June as the two candidates bid for re-election, criticised the decision. “Weapons of war have no place on the streets of America,” they said.

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