Justices are reviewing then-president Donald Trump's 2018 ban on bump stocks, after their use in a Las Vegas mass shooting that left 60 dead.
is at the Supreme Court on Wednesday. This time the Second Amendment right to bear arms is nowhere in sight. Rather, the question is the legality of a federal regulation banning devices that modify semiautomatic weapons to speed the firing mechanism.in 2018 after a single gunman in Las Vegas, using multiple guns modified by so-called bump stock devices, killed 60 people and wounded 400 more — all in the space of 11 minutes.
Actually, it wasn’t a machine gun. The shooter was armed with 14 semiautomatic weapons, modified with bump stocks to generate rapid fire. And the carnage was so horrific that Trump almost immediately ordered the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to ban the sale and possession of these devices that the ATF now says convert otherwiseMachine guns were developed at the end of the 1800s for use as military weapons in battle.
At the heart of the dispute is a highly technical question about how bump stocks work in practice. In its brief for the ATF, the government notes that under the National Firearms Act Congress banned machine guns because they eliminate the manual movements that a shooter would otherwise have to make in order to fire continuously.
Each side focuses on its strengths. The government stresses the lethality of semiautomatic weapons when they are modified by bump stocks. And it notes that when Congress amended the National Firearms Act in 1968 and 1986, it added that machine gun parts themselves count as machine guns.
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