Today, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’ January 2023 decision that struck down the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) rule prohibiting bump stocks — a win for the gun industry and a loss for public safety. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion for the majority in Garland v. Cargill, with Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson dissenting.
Bump stocks are replacement shoulder stocks that drastically increase the rate of fire of semi-automatic AR-15s and AK-47s, allowing them to fire up to 800 rounds per minute. The perpetrator of the October 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas — the deadliest in modern American history — carried out his attack with an arsenal of weapons, including 14 AR-15-style rifles equipped with bump stocks.
With the Cargill decision, bump stocks may now become legal to own again in as many as 34 states that do not have their own laws prohibiting the devices.
the bump stock ban
After the Las Vegas shooting, the ATF proposed a rule clarifying that bump stocks fit within the federal definition of “machine gun,” which includes “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger” as well as any part designed and intended to create a machine gun.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 was the first federal legislation to place strict ownership and registration requirements on machine guns, and the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act further prohibited civilians from owning machine guns manufactured after May 1986.
In the rule that went into effect in March 2019, the ATF explained how bump stocks make rifles fire “automatically,” stating, “[W]hen a bump-stock-type device is affixed to a semiautomatic firearm, the device harnesses and directs the firearm’s recoil energy to slide the firearm back and forth so that the trigger automatically re-engages by ‘bumping’ the shooter’s stationary finger without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter.”
To learn more about bump stocks and how they work, click here.
The SUPREME COURT RULING
In the majority opinion, Justice Thomas concluded that bump stocks are not machine guns because a “semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.’ With or without a bump stock, a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot. And, any subsequent shot fired after the trigger has been released and reset is the result of a separate and distinct ‘function of the trigger.’ All that a bump stock does is accelerate the rate of fire by causing these distinct ‘function[s]’ of the trigger to occur in rapid succession.”
However, if a shooter uses a bump stock as it was designed and intended — as the animation here shows — a shooter does not have to move their trigger finger to “release and reset the trigger between every shot.” The bump stock, harnessing the rifle’s recoil, does that for them.
To the Supreme Court majority, the fact that the shooter must maintain forward pressure on the rifle is key. According to Justice Thomas, “Firing multiple shots using a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock requires more than a single function of the trigger. A shooter must also actively maintain just the right amount of forward pressure on the rifle’s front grip with his nontrigger hand.”
In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor wrote, “The majority looks to the internal [trigger] mechanism that initiates fire, rather than the human act of the shooter’s initial pull, to hold that a ‘single function of the trigger’ means a reset of the trigger mechanism. Its interpretation requires six diagrams and an animation to decipher the meaning of the statutory text…Then, shifting focus from the internal mechanism of the gun to the perspective of the shooter, the majority holds that continuous forward pressure is too much human input for bump-stock-enabled continuous fire to be ‘automatic.’”
According to Justice Sotomayor, “The majority’s reading flies in the face of this Court’s standard tools of statutory interpretation. By casting aside the [federal machine gun] statute’s ordinary meaning both at the time of its enactment and today, the majority eviscerates Congress’s regulation of machineguns and enables gun users and manufacturers to circumvent federal law.”
the Groups who opposed the ATF’s rule
Gun groups like the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America (GOA), Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC), and even the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association, all submitted amicus briefs in support of the plaintiff, Michael Cargill, asserting that the ATF had exceeded its authority in issuing a federal regulation clarifying that a bump stock is a machine gun.
In the immediate aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, the NRA said that bump stocks “should be subject to additional regulations” but stopped short of supporting an all-out ban on the devices, while GOA and the FPC challenged the ban in separate court cases that failed. Cargill — who purchased two bump stocks in April 2018, shortly after the ATF first proposed its rule, but well before the rule went into effect in March 2019 — was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance.