Supreme Court is hearing arguments on Trump-era gun bump stock ban. Here’s what to know

The debate around whether or not the federal government can ban “bump stocks” – devices that can be added to a semi-automatic firearm to make a gun fire faster – has now headed to the nation’s highest court.

On Wednesday 28 February, the Supreme Court justices are hearing oral arguments in the case of Garland v Cargill.

The case concerns a ban on bump stocks that the Trump administration imposed after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, where a gunman used a bump stock to fire more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition into a music festival crowd, killing 58 people initially (two other injured individuals died years later) in just 11 minutes.

The ban required the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to prohibit the sale and possession of the devices, claiming it would turn legally obtained semi-automatic firearms into illegal machine guns.

A gun owner and licensed dealer in Texas, Michael Cargill, refuted that when having to surrender his two bump stocks, claiming the ATF overstepped its authority when interpreting a statute on machine guns to include bump stocks.

Unlike other cases involving gun control legislation, this one does not directly challenge the Second Amendment.

Instead, justices will need to decide if the changes a bump stock makes to a semi-automatic firearm effectively turn it into a machine gun – a type of firearm which is currently federally regulated.

Under a 1986 law, machine guns are defined as “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”.

That definition also includes a provision for “any part designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into