Supreme Court hears challenge to Trump-era ban on bump stocks in a major gun control case

CNN —

For Michael Cargill, the thorny dispute over bump stocks is only partly about the controversial devices themselves.

It’s also about what Cargill views as government overreach.

“It’s the principle of it,” said the 54-year-old Texas gun store owner who six years ago sued over a federal ban on the devices, which allow people to fire semi-automatic rifles far more rapidly. “We definitely never should have opened those floodgates in the first place.”

The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday in Cargill’s case challenging the Donald Trump-era regulation that treats bump stocks as machine guns and bans Americans from owning them. The devices allow shooters to turn semi-automatic rifles into weapons that can fire several hundred rounds per minute.

Though the appeal doesn’t involve the Second Amendment, it once again thrusts the fraught debate over guns onto the Supreme Court’s docket as the nation continues to reel from mass shootings. The ban was a response to the 2017 Las Vegas shooting in which a gunman armed with semi-automatic rifles and the devices opened fire on a concert from his hotel suite, killing 58 people and wounding hundreds more.

It’s also the latest of several important cases this year that will give the court’s 6-3 conservative majority an opportunity to limit the power of federal agencies.

The dispute is loosely tied to a gun control law Congress enacted in the 1930s intended to target infamous gangsters like Al Capone and John Dillinger. Responding to grisly crimes in which machine guns were used to rob banks or ambush police, lawmakers stepped in and initially required owners to register the weapons.

Wayne LaPierre should pay the powerful gun rights group $4.3 million in damages for