NewsNation) — Long before Friday’s Supreme Court decision overturned a ban on bump stocks, the U.S. government concluded the semiautomatic rifle attachment that have become controversial in recent years did not rise to the level of turning weapons into machine guns.
However, the court’s 6-3 ruling to overturn the 2019 ban which gained the support of former President Donald Trump, comes at a time when the United States is still struggling to deal with gun violence, including multiple incidents in which assault-style weapons were used.
Yet, as Congress remains slow to address issues surrounding gun control, the nation’s highest course reversed course in a matter that ultimately came down to how much authority the government should have.
In this case, in determining whether bump stocks turn semiautomatic weapons into something illegal.
“It cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger’ and even if it could, it would not do so ‘automatically,’” Supreme Court Justice Clarence wrote in the majority decision.
What is a bump stock?
Bump stocks were created in the early 2000s after a 1994 ban on assault weapons had expired.
The attachment “bumps” between the shooter’s shoulder and uses the rifle’s recoil energy to rapidly and repeatedly bump the trigger against the shooter’s index finger. The stock allows the weapon to fire dozens of bullets in a matter of seconds, much in a way a machine gun is capable.
Congress outlawed machine guns under the National Firearms Act of 1934 and defined them as weapons that shoot, are designed to shoot, or could be readily restored to shoot automatically more than one shot without manually reloading by a single function of the trigger.
In 1968, the law was expanded to include any parts that could be attached to a weapon to convert it into a machine gun.
What led to the bump stock ban?
According to court documents reviewed by the Associated Press, more than 520,000 bump stocks were in circulation when Washington lawmakers enacted the ban on the device in 2020.
Bump stocks were approved for sale in 2010 after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives found semiautomatic rifles with bump stocks attached should not be considered illegal machine guns under the definition of federal law.
However, after a gunman opened fire on a crowd attending a country music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, killing 60 people and injuring 850 more using weapons — some of which included bump stocks — lawmakers began to consider reversing course from the government’s initial decision.
In that shooting, law enforcement officers discovered 23 assault-style weapons in the shooter’s hotel room, including 14 that were fitted with bump stocks. Police concluded the shooter, who took his own life after the shooting, had fired more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition into the crowd in less than 11 minutes.
A year later, following an investigation into the shooting by ATF officials, the federal agency, backed by Trump, ordered that bump stocks be considered illegal.
Under the ban, bump stock owners had until March 2019 to either turn the devices in or have them destroyed.
Why SCOTUS considered bump stocks?
Based on a complaint by Texas gun shop owner Michael Cargill, the group New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a lawsuit that challenged the ban,
The suit argued that federal officials did not have the authority to ban the devices. While the complaint did not address the Second Amendment rights of Americans who own guns, it instead questioned the government’s authority to ban the devices if they did not turn the rifle into a machine gun.
In February, during oral arguments for the Supreme Court to consider reversing the Trump-era ban, the debate involved talks over whether bump stocks turn the weapons into an actual machine gun
At the time, justices struggled to understand how a bump stock worked and how it makes the gun fire more rapidly, The New York Times reported.
The state of other gun laws
Friday’s decision comes at a time when Congress has been slow to address gun control on a federal level. However, legal experts have said that the Supreme Court ruling on bump stocks could impact other gun measures across the country.
The 2019 ban on bump stocks was one of only a few restrictions on gun control in recent years and came months after the Supreme Court declined to consider a measure to overturn Illinois’ ban on assault weapons, which was enacted after a shooter opened fire on a July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, that killed seven people.
Across the country, several new state laws – including a ban on concealed carry in certain areas of California, expanded waiting periods for gun purchases in Washington, and a ban on ghost guns in Colorado – enacted new gun laws in 2024.
The laws were passed at the same time after a leading ghost gun manufacturer agreed to stop selling the weapons in Maryland under a settlement agreement. The agreement was reached after Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said that nine out of every 10 homicides in Baltimore are committed with guns.
Meanwhile, in other parts of the country, gun manufacturers are producing less-lethal styles of guns designed to provide people with self-defense tools that aren’t considered as dangerous.
“It looks like a gun. It operates like a gun. It feels like a gun,” Bryan Ganz, the creator of the Bryna Launcher, told NewsNation. “It simply doesn’t kill people like a gun.”
He described the weapon as a “paintball gun on steroids.”