By Steve Neavling
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review whether the ATF may ban “bump stocks,” the gun attachments that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns, The Los Angeles Times reports.
While federal law has banned machine guns since 1934, gun advocates argue bump stocks can’t be outlawed as a type of machine gun.
The Trump administration, through the ATF, reclassified the devices in 2018 after a shooter in Las Vegas used semiautomatic weapons equipped with bump stocks to kill 58 people and wound more than 500 others. The new ATF rules declared that bump stocks function a “a self-acting or self-regulating mechanism that allows the firing of multiple rounds through a single pull of the trigger.”
After gun advocates challenged the regulations, the new rules were upheld by the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, the 6th Circuit Court in Cincinnati and the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
But the conservative 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans ruled that the ban was illegal. Solicitor Gen. Elizabeth Prelogar appealed that decision and is asking the Supreme Court to address the regulations.
