(DailyChive.com) – The US Supreme Court rolled back a Trump-era regulation that categorized bump stocks firearms as machine guns and outlawed their use by civilians.
According to the verdict, installing a bump stock on a semi-automatic weapon does not make it a machine gun, so they cannot be banned directly under the definition of the machine gun.
Semi-automatic firearms are usually different from machine guns in a way that the shooter has to re-engage the trigger every time compared to machine guns, where a single press of the trigger can fire multiple bullets.
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) maintained that bump stocks convert semi-automatic weapons into machine guns, which makes them illegal. The shooting, which left 60 people dead and over 500 injured, also urged many lawmakers to introduce bills to outlaw the use of bump stocks.
Proponents of these laws suggested that the presence of bump stock on a semi-automatic weapon empowers the shooter to rapidly re-engage with the trigger which is the characteristics of a machine gun. However, the majority of the Supreme Court did not agree with this assertion. They wrote that machine guns exclusively represent that category of weapons that can fire more than one bullet in quick succession with a single trigger press, and semiautomatic guns are unable to do that.
All three liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented from the majority opinion and wrote that this verdict would make bump stocks accessible to the general public. Justice Sotomayor stated that a bird that walks, swims, and quacks like a duck is actually a duck and not something else.
The verdict also accused the ATF of surpassing its authority in declaring bump stock weapons as machine guns.
Pro-gun advocates praised the ruling and called it a victory of the constitution. Michael Cargill, who brought the case against the government, celebrated the verdict and stated that his efforts to protect the US Constitution have finally succeeded after five years.
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