The Supreme Court on Friday stepped into a new gun rights battle by agreeing to weigh whether a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic rifles to fire more quickly, is lawful.
The justices were asked by both the Biden administration and gun rights activists to take up the issue, with lower courts reaching differing conclusions on it.
The case concerns Texas-based gun owner and licensed dealer Michael Cargill, who owned two bump stocks before the ban went into effect and later surrendered them to the government. He sued, claiming that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives lacked the legal authority to implement the prohibition.
The conservative-majority high court issued a major ruling in June 2022 that expanded gun rights, although the legal issues arising from the bump stocks ban are different.
Bump stocks are accessories for semi-automatic rifles, such as the popular AR-15-style weapons. They use the recoil energy of a trigger pull to enable the user to fire up to hundreds of rounds a minute.
President Donald Trump’s administration imposed the ban after the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, when Stephen Paddock used bump stocks to open fire on a country music festival, initially killing 58 people. Paddock died by suicide as he was about to be apprehended.
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.
The Supreme Court in October 2022 turned away two earlier cases brought by gun rights advocates challenging the bump stocks ban.
Now the legal landscape is different, with both the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the ban was unlawful.
The Biden administration appealed in both cases, while gun rights advocates asked the justices to hear their appeal from a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that upheld the ban.
