On Feb. 28, Supreme Court justices will hear arguments in a case that could once again legalize the ownership of bump stocks. A bump stock is a device that attaches to a semi-automatic firearm and uses the rifle’s recoil to allow the shooter to depress the trigger repeatedly and quickly.
According to the Department of Justice, a bump stock allows shooters to “initiate a continuous firing cycle with the single pull of the trigger,” effectively transforming semi-automatic guns into machine guns.
In October 2017, Stephen Paddock fired more than a thousand rounds from his Mandalay Bay hotel room, shooting down on a crowd of more than 22,000 people attending a country music festival. Investigators said Paddock used bump stocks to convert his AR-15s into machine guns. Sixty people were killed and hundreds more were wounded in the assault, which remains the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
The following year, former President Donald Trump imposed a ban on bump stocks. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) finalized and published the rule in 2019, clarifying that the definition of a machine gun includes bump stocks. Opponents of the ban said the definition of “machine gun” is ambiguous.
Shortly after the bump stock ban went into place, a Texas-based licensed gun owner and dealer named Michael Cargill sued the federal government after surrendering his own bump stocks. Cargill claimed the ATF did not have the authority to prohibit the use of bump stocks.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that bump stocks do not fit the legal definition of machine guns. Now, the Supreme Court is taking up the case, and justices will have to determine if bump stocks are considered machine guns according to federal law.
It’s plausible that justices could use the legal test of 1984 Chevron doctrine, which suggests deferring to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of an ambiguous statute. This means the high court could defer to the government to define “machine gun.”
However, the Chevron rule could be moot by the time the Supreme Court rules on this case, as recent hearings involving the Chevron doctrine suggest it could be overturned by the justices.
Right now, under 26 U.S.C. § 5845, the term machine gun means “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot or can be readily restored to shoot automatically one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
The term also includes any “combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun.”