Bump stocks don’t convert semiautomatic rifles into “machineguns,” the Supreme Court said in a 6-3 decision by Justice Clarence Thomas, a ruling that the dissent pointed out “puts bump stocks back in civilian hands.”
Bump stocks attach to semiautomatic rifles, enabling rapid fire. After the deadly mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives under the Trump administration said that the devices meet the definition of a machine gun.
But the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that federal law excluded bump stocks from the definition. The Biden administration appealed to the justices, arguing that if the circuit ruling stands, then “its consequences are likely to reverberate nationwide,” deeming the issue one that’s “exceptionally important for federal law enforcement and public safety.”
Affirming the 5th Circuit, Thomas concluded for the majority that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock “is not a ‘machinegun’ because it does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.’”
In dissent for the court’s Democratic appointees, Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized the majority’s “artificially narrow definition” that she said “hamstrings the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” She wrote that the majority’s logic “simply does not overcome the overwhelming textual and contextual evidence that ‘single function of the trigger’ means a single action by the shooter to initiate a firing sequence, including pulling a trigger and pushing forward on a bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged “the horrible shooting spree in Las Vegas in 2017” but said that “an event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning.” He noted that Congress can now amend the law if it wants to.
Though it’s gun-related, the case didn’t call for interpreting the Second Amendment, which is at issue in another case this term, United States v. Rahimi.
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for weekly updates on the top legal stories, including news from the Supreme Court, the Donald Trump cases and more.
