Bangkok Post

Supreme Court to hear ‘bump stocks’ gun case

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court was to hear arguments yesterday on the legality of “bump stocks,” simple devices that can allow automatic fire from otherwise semi-automatic guns.

The country has strong laws supporting gun rights, and the conservati­vemajority high court has previously struck down gun control measures.

The case stems from the worst mass shooting in US history, in October 2017, when a man — using guns equipped with bump stocks — fired on a crowd attending an outdoor music concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding around 500.

Even by US standards, where gun violence is common and there are more firearms than citizens, the attack sparked shock.

In response, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) moved to revise its regulation­s on bump stocks, declaring them in December 2018 as falling under an existing ban on machine guns, making their possession a crime.

The Justice Department under the Donald Trump administra­tion had worked with the ATF to declare detachable devices illegal.

Another particular­ly shocking mass shooting had occurred that year at a high school in Parkland, Florida, leaving 17 dead.

But the ATF rule was challenged in court almost immediatel­y, and has now worked its way up to the Supreme Court in a case pitting President Joe Biden’s Justice Department against Michael Cargill, a gun seller from Texas.

“A bump stock transforms a semiautoma­tic rifle into a weapon that shoots hundreds of bullets per minute with a single pull of the trigger,” US SolicitorG­eneral Elizabeth Prelogar said in written arguments.

Mr Cargill’s lawyers argue that the ATF oversteppe­d its bounds, and that classifyin­g bump stocks as machine guns “is a decision for Congress to make, not agencies or courts”.

The Supreme Court previously expanded gun rights in a 2022 ruling that said Americans have a fundamenta­l right to carry a handgun in public, though certain regulation­s still exist around the practice.

A conservati­ve f ederal appeals court ruled in March 2023 that a law barring people under domestic violence court orders from owning a gun was unconstitu­tional.

That case will also be decided upon by the Supreme Court this year.