Supreme Court Strikes Down Trump-Era Ban on Bump Stocks
A 6-3 Supreme Court threw out a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, finding on Friday that the Justice Department exceeded its authority by classifying the device, which modifies a semiautomatic weapon to fire with the speed and lethality of military arms like the M16, as a machine gun. The opinion, by Justice Clarence Thomas, strikes down a rule issued in the aftermath of a 2017 massacre in Las Vegas, when a shooter armed with bump stocks killed some 60 people at a music festival. At then-President Donald Trump’s direction, the Justice Department reclassified bump stocks to take them off the market. Friday’s opinion found the government went too far, stretching the definition of machine gun Congress established in the 1930s. Because the device creates a fusillade of bullets by producing repeated rapid pulls of the trigger, rather than through a single pull, a bump stock doesn’t convert a semiautomatic weapon into a machine gun, Thomas found, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas’s opinion was illustrated with diagrams showing the operation of the device.
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