The President Trump-imposed ban on bump stocks has been subject to reconsideration by the Supreme Court.
The original prohibition came into effect after Stephen Paddock’s attack in Las Vegas, which claimed 58 lives.
Considering the Republican Party’s staunch opposition to gun control measures, President Trump’s decision to restrict some weapon attachments came as quite a shock.
The question of whether or not the prohibition violates the Constitution is now before the Supreme Court.
The SCOTUS will hear the case about bump stocks… here we go. https://t.co/HMNJzJBpKB
— Military Arms (@MAC_Arms) November 3, 2023
CNN shares more on the story:
The decision to hear the case comes as the country is still reeling from the latest mass shooting and just days before the justices are poised to revisit a landmark Second Amendment opinion from 2022 that expanded gun rights nationwide.
Under then-President Donald Trump, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives banned bump stock devices in 2019 and ordered people who possessed the devices to destroy them or turn them into an ATF office. Trump had ordered a review of the devices after a mass shooting in 2017 in Las Vegas, in which a shooter armed with semiautomatic weapons and bump stock devices opened fire from his hotel suite onto outdoor concertgoers, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds of others.
The challenge goes to whether ATF exceeded its authority in 2018 by reclassifying bump stocks as “machine guns” under the National Firearms Act. Under federal law a “machine gun” is interpreted as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
The ban on bump stocks is one of the few government initiatives that President Trump has introduced that MAGA supporters may contest.
Great news. The regulatory bump stock ban is blatantly unconstitutional, not because of the 2A, but because statutory language is clear on what is and is not a “machine gun.” DOJ doesn’t get to unilaterally rewrite laws whenever it feels like it. https://t.co/UzKYxE3Be1
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) November 3, 2023
Will Trump's bumpstock ban be undone by SCOTUS? Stay tuned… https://t.co/EzyS7l1Kc2
— GreatLakesGunRights (@GLGunRights) November 3, 2023
NBC News shares more on the story:
“Guns equipped with bump stocks can cause massive devastation. These are devices that fire like machine guns and kill like machine guns, so it’s a no-brainer that they should be regulated like machine guns,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group.
The policy went into effect in 2019 after the Supreme Court declined to block it. Since then, the already conservative court has tilted further to the right, with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, replacing liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020.
The court, with its new 6-3 conservative majority, ruled for the first time in the June 2022 gun rights decision that the right to bear arms under the Constitution’s Second Amendment protects an individual right to carry a handgun outside the home. The ruling was the most significant expansion of gun rights since the Supreme Court held in 2008 that there was an individual right to bear arms in self-defense at home.
I’m wondering if they’ll lift the prohibition.
The conservative majority on the Supreme Court might decide to uphold the law even if they don’t agree with it.
I suppose that they might not want to go against anything that President Trump put into effect.
The removal of the restriction, however, would be welcomed by many Republicans.
Give me your feedback, okay?