The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) issued the prohibition on these firearm accessories after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre that saw more than 1,000 rounds fired and 60 people lose their lives.
In the ensuing outcry, many felt the ATF overreached when it essentially changed federal law through a new rule.
Justice Clarence Thomas agreed as he wrote for the majority.
“We hold that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.’” Thomas noted that even if the firing mechanism could do so, it would not be automatic.
The justice added, “ATF, therefore, exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies bump stocks as machine guns.”
If the high court had determined that the addition of a bump stock met the definition of a machine gun, the rule it instead overturned would have been embedded in stone.
This would mean bump stocks would be banned under the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA).
There was a time when firearms defined as machine guns could be registered with the federal government. However, that door closed in 1986, meaning that no bump stocks would qualify to be registered and therefore, legal.
For further explanation, Thomas detailed that Congress had the authority to link the legal definition of a machine gun to a weapon’s rate of fire. While this would have suited the purposes of the ATF and the high court’s minority, lawmakers did not take this step.
Instead, they “enacted a statute that turns on whether a weapon can fire more than one shot ‘automatically…by a single function of the trigger.”
With that definition in place, the majority declared that federal agencies are not empowered to rewrite “statutory text under the banner of speculation about what Congress might have done.”
Prior to the Las Vegas tragedy, the ATF consistently held that attaching a bump stock to a weapon did not magically transform it into a federally regulated machine gun.
There were more than ten instances cited by the Supreme Court spanning multiple presidential administrations in which the agency determined that bump stocks did not make a weapon a machine gun. In its own words, the firearm still could not fire more than one round “by a single function of the trigger.”
As late as April 2017, the ATF concluded that the bump stock does not enable the rifle to shoot multiple rounds automatically because “forward pressure must be applied with the shooter’s support hand to the forward handguard.”
And while earlier agency regulations merely restated the law established by Congress, the latest protocol created an entirely new definition that ran counter to that established by lawmakers.
Therefore, the high court swept aside the bump stock ban and again made these common accessories legal.
Bump stock inventor Jeremiah Cottle celebrated the Supreme Court decision. His company, SlideFire, closed in 2018 due to the ban and subsequent lawsuits.
Cottle told CBS Texas that he waited over half a decade after the government “unconstitutionally targeted my company and invention. Today is a win for the American people.
The door is still open for Congress to alter the established definition of a machine gun, but that would be through the constitutionally mandated legislative process.
On a much broader scale for Second Amendment advocates, the ruling also puts the ATF on notice that recent unilateral gun control actions that were undertaken without congressional authority may likewise be overturned.
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