The Supreme Court sided with an Austin gun store owner Friday morning in a case concerning whether bump stock rifle attachments convert the weapon into a machine gun.
In an opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court has decided that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock attachment is not a “machinegun” because the gun does not fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger” as the statute requires.
“A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does.” Justice Thomas wrote.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The dissenting justices argued that bump stocks allow a semiautomatic rifle to fire in a way that meets Congress’s definition of “machinegun.”
“All the shooter had to do was pull the trigger and press the gun forward,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “The bump stock did the rest.”
The Court heard arguments earlier this year on the legality of a federal ban on bump stock rifle attachments, a case that was brought forward by an Austin gun store owner. Michael Cargill surrendered his bump stock devices in compliance with the 2018 ban issued by the Trump administration. This ban followed the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting in which the gunman used several firearms, some with bump stock attachments, to kill 58 people.
A bump stock is a device attached to a semiautomatic firearm that “allow(s) a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger,” according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The final rule went into effect in March 2019.
“The final rule clarifies that the definition of ‘machinegun’ in the Gun Control Act (GCA) and National Firearms Act (NFA) includes bump-stock-type devices, i.e., devices that allow a semiautomatic firearm to shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm to which it is affixed so that the trigger resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter,” the ATF wrote on its website.
Cargill’s attorneys argued that bump stocks don’t change the function of a semi-automatic weapon enough to constitute that the device is illegal. The Biden administration said bump stocks meet the legal definition of a machine gun because it only takes one action to fire the weapon.
Before the Las Vegas shooting, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had determined that only specific types of bump stocks could convert semi-automatic rifles into machine guns. The ATF later issued a rule classifying all bump stocks as machine guns. Under the 2018 rule, anyone who owned or possessed a bump stock had to either destroy it or turn it in to the ATF to avoid criminal penalties.
Garland v. Cargill reached the Supreme Court in February after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled in favor of the previously existing legislation, determining that bump stocks are not defined by semi automatic rifles. During oral arguments, the Supreme Court appeared divided on the case. Conservative justices expressed concern that the regulation could subject bump stock owners to criminal liability, even though the devices were legal when they bought them.
Michael Cargill declined requests to comment until after the Supreme Court has announced the decision.
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