The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Friday to overturn a Trump-era policy banning bump stocks for semi-automatic firearms, arguing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosive (ATF) exceeded its authority.
The Trump administration’s ATF created the regulation 14 months after the deadliest U.S. mass shooting took place in 2017 at a country music festival in Las Vegas. The regulation reversed previous ATF policy that stated a semi-automatic firearm with a bump stock does not constitute a fully automatic firearm or machine gun. The Trump administration, alongside others, argued bump stocks “illegally convert semi-automatic rifles … into fully automatic machine guns,” The Federalist’s founder Sean Davis explained.
Upon implementation of the rule, anyone who owned bump stocks had 90 days to either destroy them or surrender them to the government in what represented “the most sweeping federal gun control effort since the so-called assault weapons ban, which was passed in 1994 and expired in 2003,” Davis wrote.
The high court struck down the rule, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing for the majority.
Michael Cargill, who was forced to surrender two bump stocks after the ban went into effect, argued the ATF lacked the statutory authority under the Administrative Procedure Act to create the rule because under federal law, bump stocks are not “machineguns.” The Supreme Court affirmed that the ATF lacked the authority to create the rule since. A Court of Appeals similarly affirmed this decision prior to the case heading to the Supreme Court.
The Court began by acknowledging
