from The Epoch Times:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 3 rejected two challenges to the federal government’s ban on gun bump stocks that were imposed following the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017.
Bump stocks are devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to increase their rate of fire. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) reversed a previous conclusion and classified bump stocks as forbidden under a 1934 U.S. law called the National Firearms Act.
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Gun rights groups, including Gun Owners of America, and a Utah-based gun rights advocate brought several cases to the nine Supreme Court justices to reverse the ban. They made no comments in declining to hear them (pdf), which were among several cases that the court declined to hear on the first day of the high court’s new term.
Clark Aposhian, the Utah gun-rights advocate, sued to halt the ban in 2019, challenging the ATF’s authority in reclassifying bump stocks as forbidden machine guns. After a federal judge refused to grant him an injunction early in the case, Aposhian surrendered his device, pending the outcome of the litigation.
Separately, gun owner advocacy groups including Gun Owners of America and three of its individual members sued in federal court in Michigan to block the bump stock ban from taking effect. The Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2021 upheld the ban.
After the Supreme Court’s Oct. 3 ruling, Gun Owners of America issued a statement saying the ban sets a “dangerous precedent” that will give the federal government broader powers to regulate firearms.
“This decision sets a horrible and dangerous precedent, one that will allow the ATF to further arbitrarily regulate various firearms,” the group wrote on Twitter. “This very same precedent is already being abused by Joe Biden to ban millions of lawfully purchased pistols even without an ACT of Congress!”
Earlier this year, lawyers for the Biden administration urged the Supreme Court to stay out of the dispute over the ATF rule.
The ATF had “determined that bump stocks are machine guns under the statue, not that the agency had discretionary authority under the statute to classify them as machine guns,” Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar argued in a court filing.
“ATF’s interpretation reflects the best understanding of the statutory language,” she wrote.
Ban
A bump stock uses the recoil action of a semi-automatic rifle to simulate fully automatic firing.
In 2017, the ATF rule banning bump stocks stipulated “that [bump stocks] are ‘machineguns’ as defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968” as these devices “allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.”
When the rule was proposed about five years ago, the agency estimated that Americans possessed about 520,000 bump stocks. The ban required them to either be relinquished or destroyed.
