Supreme Court May Torch Another Major Gun Reform

When former President Donald Trump banned the gun components known as “bump stocks” in 2018, following a horrific mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas, it set off a legal firestorm. On Wednesday, battle reached the Supreme Court, where conservative justices appeared to be skeptical in oral arguments that Trump had the authority to use an agency rule to enact the ban.

Bump stocks harness the recoil energy of a gun to slide back and forth, allowing a shooter to fire hundreds of rounds per minute and enabling a semiautomatic weapon to fire at rates similar to an automatic one.

It was far from clear how the high court would rule after Wednesday’s arguments in the case, Garland v. Cargill. But conservative justices repeatedly pressed deputy solicitor general Brian Fletcher about why Congress had not specifically banned bump stocks, and expressed concern about what would happen to people who’d bought them lawfully.

“The question is, why didn’t Congress pass that definition to cover this more clearly?” Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked.

Congress banned machine guns in 1934 with the National Firearms Act. That legislation generally criminalizes civilian possession of weapons that fire by a “single function of the trigger.” The 1968 Gun Control Act included modification devices as part of the definition for machine guns.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives first classified bump stocks as legal in 2006. After the Las Vegas shooter used them to fire more than 1,000 rounds in the deadliest shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history, the Trump administration directed the ATF to reassess them.

In 2018, the agency’s new rule classified bump stocks as modifications that create machine