On Wednesday, the Supreme Court appeared poised to uphold a Trump-era regulation that would ban “stocks” that function like machine guns and allow a shooter to fire hundreds of bullets per minute.
The justices, both conservative and liberal, said Congress had intended to ban rapid-fire rifles as especially dangerous. And that would include devices that turn a legal semi-automatic pistol into one that “produces a torrent of bullets with just the pull of the trigger,” Justice Elena Kagan said.
Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said it would have been better if Congress had reviewed the law after the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, but he and other conservatives did not indicate they would vote to block a regulation adopted after that tragedy.
“It would have been irresponsible for the AFT not to take action” after the deadliest mass shooting in the country's history, Deputy Attorney General Brian Fletcher told the court.
On October 1, 2017, a gunman on the top floor of a Las Vegas hotel fired more than 1,000 bullets in 11 minutes, leaving more than 500 concertgoers injured and 58 dead. The shooter used AR-15 semi-automatic rifles equipped with stocks that allowed for rapid, continuous fire.
Shortly after, President Trump ordered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (AFT) to review its rule and ban firearms such as illegal machine guns.
It's the rare case of a gun regulation that has support from both prominent Republicans and Democrats but now faces a court whose conservative justices are often skeptical of agencies that issue new regulations that reinterpret old laws.
While they asked skeptical questions, neither justice seemed willing to strike down the impact stock rule.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned the need for such devices. “Why would a person choose to fire between 400 and 800 bullets per minute?” she asked.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said the stock allows an AR-15 to function as a machine gun. “These guns are what Congress intended to ban,” he said.
Since 1934, Congress has restricted machine guns, which were defined as “any weapon that fires…automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, with a single function of the trigger.”
Before 2017, the ATF said butt devices were not machine guns because the shooter had to press the barrel forward when the recoil hit or fired another shot.
But after Trump's order, the ATF changed its position.
Their new rule said stocks were illegal machine guns because they function as “a self-action or self-regulating mechanism that allows multiple rounds to be fired using a single trigger pull.”
A stock is a piece of plastic or metal that fits over the barrel. The ATF says it rests against the shooter's shoulder and “allows a semi-automatic firearm to fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing recoil energy… so that the trigger resets and continues firing without physical manipulation.” of the shooter”. the trigger by the shooter.”
In 2018, when ATF regulation went into effect, about 520,000 buttstock devices were in the hands of gun owners and dealers. The agency said they must be destroyed or handed over.
Gun owners sued to challenge the new regulation. They lost in the United States courts of appeals in Denver, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., but won before the Fifth Circuit Court in New Orleans.
Michael Cargill, a gun store owner in Austin, Texas, had sued and argued that the government should not be allowed to change its rules and recall legally purchased guns. He won a 13-3 decision in the Fifth Circuit whose judges said the stocks do not operate “automatically” like a machine gun because the shooter must “maintain forward manual pressure on the barrel” to continue firing.
Dissenting, Justice Stephen Higginson faulted the majority for revising an ambiguous law “to legalize an instrument of mass murder.”
In November, the court agreed to hear the case Garland v. Cargill to decide the legality of the ATF regulation. The Second Amendment right to bear arms is not directly at issue.
California and 16 other states had already banned booster stocks, but state attorneys said those bans will be more difficult to enforce if booster stocks can be legally purchased in other parts of the country.
