The highest US court on Friday overturned the federal ban on “bump stocks”, a device that increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles and turns them de facto into machine guns.
This Friday, June 14, the US Supreme Court dealt supporters of stronger gun control a setback by overturning the federal ban on “bump stocks”, a device that increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles that de facto convert into machine guns.
The backdrop for this affair is the Las Vegas massacre, the worst in modern American history, in which 58 people were killed and more than 500 injured on October 1, 2017. Most of the 22 guns of the perpetrator of this carnage were equipped with these detachable stocks , and he was thus able to fire at a rate of up to nine bullets per second.
“Not a ‘machine gun'”
By six votes to three, the conservative justices to the progressives, the court affirmed that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a federal agency, had exceeded its authority by reclassifying “bump stocks” in 2018 in the category of machine guns , banned by a 1934 law.
“We hold that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot with ‘a single pull of the trigger,'” wrote Justice Clarence Thomas for the majority. , referring to the text of the 1934 law passed at the time of Prohibition, long before the invention of this device.
The Las Vegas massacre “demonstrated that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun and therefore strengthened the case for a revision of this law”, acknowledges his side conservative Justice Samuel Alito.
“But an event that highlights the need to change the law does not in itself change the meaning of the law,” he adds, calling for Congressional intervention.
A decision that “will have deadly consequences”
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, along with her two other progressive colleagues, criticize the majority’s decision to “reject the common definition” of machine guns, warning that it “will have deadly consequences” by “obstructing government efforts to prevent shooters like the one in Las Vegas from having access The ATF had begun to review its stance on these removable stocks after the Las Vegas tragedy.
In February 2018, a few days after a killing at a high school in Florida (southeast), in which 17 people died, the administration of the then Republican president, Donald Trump, committed to banning “bump stocks”.
In December of that year, the ATF announced that it would now consider “bump stocks” to be machine guns and ordered owners to destroy them or turn them over to authorities within 90 days.
