On a party line vote, the Court legalized “bump stocks,” which convert semiautomatic guns into fully automatic ones.
The six Republican justices handed down a decision on Friday that effectively legalizes civilian ownership of automatic weapons. All three of the Court’s Democrats dissented.
The Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill involves bump stocks, devices that allow ordinary semiautomatic weapons that can legally be owned by civilians to automatically fire, much like a machine gun designed for that purpose. Bump stocks cause a semiautomatic gun’s trigger to buck against the shooter’s finger, repeatedly “bumping” the trigger and making the gun rapidly fire.
A semiautomatic weapon refers to a gun that loads a bullet into the chamber or otherwise prepares itself to fire again after discharging a bullet, but that will not fire a second bullet until the shooter pulls the trigger a second time. An automatic weapon, by contrast, will fire a continuous stream of bullets.
As Justice Sonia Sotomayor notes in her dissent, the Trump administration decided to ban bump stocks after a shooter opened fire on a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, killing 58 people and wounding over 500 in a matter of minutes. The shooter used bump stocks to kill so many people so quickly.
Get the latest developments on the US Supreme Court from senior correspondent Ian Millhiser.
A 1986 law makes it a crime to own a “machinegun,” and the Trump administration determined that this law is broad enough to encompass bump stocks. That law defines a “machinegun” to include “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.
