On Tuesday, a three-judge panel unanimously ruled that the administrative ban by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) is too vague to stand. The agency’s banning of the firearm accessory used the definition of “machine gun” to prohibit bump stocks, but the judges found the ATF confused the issue.
The case was filed by Scott Hardin, a Kentucky man who owned several of the accessories when the 2019 prohibition was handed down. He lost in District Court before appealing to the Sixth Circuit.
Judge Ronald Lee Gilman wrote in the court’s opinion that Congress could act to “clear up the ambiguities, but so far Congress has failed to act.” The Bill Clinton appointee cited current law that “does not clearly and unambiguously prohibit bump stocks” in ruling against the regulation.
The Fifth Circuit struck down the controversial ban in January in its ruling in a separate case. The Biden administration requested that the U.S. Supreme Court hear its appeal on the decision, declaring it “threatens significant harm to public safety.”
The ban emerged from the Trump administration after the 2018 Las Vegas mass shooting that killed dozens of concert goers.
The high court could decide the matter as there have been wildly disparate rulings favoring both sides of the issue by appeals courts. Tuesday’s decision was preceded by three separate rulings supporting the ATF’s definition of bump stocks as machine gun parts.
The Tenth Circuit upheld that position in 2020, the Sixth Circuit in 2021, and the D.C. Circuit last year.
The difficulty in finding a consensus stems largely from the uncertainty in defining exactly what a machine gun is. Federal law classifies a machine gun as any weapon which may fire more than one round “by a single function of the trigger.”
Bump stocks use the recoil of a gun to assist the shooter to pull the trigger faster. However, they still require an individual function of the trigger for each firing.
This led to gun rights advocates challenging the ATF rule that bump stocks transformed weapons into unregistered machine guns — thus falling under the National Firearms Act. Illegal possession of such a weapon could bring up to ten years in prison.
This week’s ruling, as expressed by Judge Gilman, leaned heavily on the unclear definition of a machine gun as it applies to the statute. He cited the rule of lenity that requires favoring the rights of a defendant in the face of an unclear law.
A separate concurring opinion came from Judge John Bush, a Trump appointee. He went beyond the majority opinion and declared that the attaching of a bump stock to a rifle clearly does not make it a machine gun as defined by law.
“The best reading of the statute is that Congress never gave the ATF ‘the power to expand the law banning machine guns through [the] legislative shortcut’ of the ATF’s rule at issue in this appeal.”
Without clear congressional authority, the agency must abide by the current statute. That, Bush declared, means “the addition of a bump stock to a rifle clearly does not make it a machine gun.” He noted that his opinion differed somewhat from the other two justices in that regard, but all agreed changing the law as it relates to bump stocks is up to Congress, not the ATF.
Though this is hardly the last word, the Sixth Court remanded the case back to the district court and ordered it to rule in favor of the plaintiff.
