By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. Supreme Court justices struggled over technical aspects of “bump stocks” on Wednesday as they considered the legality of a ban imposed under former President Donald Trump on these devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns in the latest case targeting a firearms restriction.
The justices heard arguments in an appeal by President Joe Biden’s administration of a lower court’s ruling in favor of Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban implemented place after a 2017 mass shooting that killed 58 people in Las Vegas.
Questions posed by the justices did not clearly signal how they will resolve the case in a ruling due by the end of June.
The Supreme Court, with a 6-3 conservative majority, has taken a broad view of gun rights in a country deeply divided over how to address firearms violence, most recently in its landmark 2022 ruling striking down New York state’s limits on carrying concealed handguns outside the home.
The current case centers on whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a U.S. Justice Department agency, properly interpreted a law banning machine guns as extending to bump stocks. Machine guns are defined under a 1934 law called the National Firearms Act as weapons that can “automatically” fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.”
Asked by some justices to explain how a bump stock’s features satisfy that definition, Justice Department lawyer Brian Fletcher said that “a function of the trigger happens when some act of the shooter, usually a pull, starts a firing sequence.”
“Intuitively, I am entirely sympathetic to your argument. I mean, and it seems like, yes, this is functioning like a machine gun would,” said conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett. “But, looking at that definition, I think the question is why didn’t Congress pass that legislation to make this covered more clearly?”
Bump stocks did not exist when the 1934 law was passed. The ATF rule, reversing the agency’s prior stance, took effect in 2019.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito pushed back against Fletcher’s interpretation, saying the language of the law seemed to be describing the internal mechanics of a gun, not actions by a shooter.
“Isn’t that the most straightforward interpretation of this?” Alito asked.
Bump stocks use a semiautomatic’s recoil to allow it to slide back and forth while “bumping” into the shooter’s trigger finger, resulting in rapid fire. The devices let a shooter fire up to 800 bullets per minute, a rate comparable to machine guns issued to American soldiers, according to the Justice Department.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh noted that the two presidential administrations before Trump’s had decided that rifles with bump stocks were not considered machine guns as defined by the statute at issue.
“That’s reason for pause,” Kavanaugh said.
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson told Cargill’s lawyer Jonathan Mitchell that Congress did not ban machine guns intending to focus on the mechanics of a trigger, but rather to capture weapons that achieve similar results.
“Why would Congress want to prohibit certain things based on whether the trigger is moving, as opposed to certain things that can achieve this lethal kind of spray of bullets?” Jackson asked.
Mitchell said that bump stocks lead to a “very high rate of fire, but it’s not automatic.”
‘A LITTLE BIT OF COMMON SENSE’
Liberal Justice Elena Kagan told Mitchell that a machine gun requires continuous pressure on a trigger, while a bump stock requires continuous pressure on a barrel.
“I can’t understand how anybody could think that those two things should be treated differently,” Kagan said.
“At some point, you have to apply a little bit of common sense to the way you read a statute,” Kagan added.
After a gunman used weapons outfitted with bump stocks in the shooting spree at a country music festival in Las Vegas, Trump’s administration took action to prohibit the devices.
“After the Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest shooting in our nation’s history, I think it would have been irresponsible for the ATF not to take another closer look at this prior interpretation,” Fletcher said.
Federal law prohibits the sale or possession of machine guns, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed concern about the implication for bump stock owners, saying that the ATF’s more expansive interpretation of the law “would render between a quarter of a million and a half million people federal felons.”
The New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year sided with Cargill, concluding that the law did not unambiguously favor ATF’s reading of the statute.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung and John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
