Supreme Court strikes down ban on ‘bump stocks’ — a gun accessory used in 2017 Las Vegas massacre

The Supreme Court said a ban on bump stocks — devices that can be added to semi-automatic firearms to make them fire faster — was unconstitutional, striking down a Trump-era law that was put into place after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.

In a 6-3 ruling issued on Friday, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) incorrectly ruled that a bump stock turns a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun.

“A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a “machinegun”… because: (1) it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger’ and (2) even if it could, it would not do so ‘automatically,’” Thomas wrote.

It is a major ruling for gun access in the United States at a time when mass shootings are a major concern for millions of Americans.

The case, Garland v Cargill, arose after Michael Cargill, a gun owner and licensed dealer in Texas, challenged a law that required him to surrender his bump stocks to the ATF.

The Trump-era ban was imposed after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, when a gunman used a bump stock to fire more than 1,000 rounds of ammunition into a music festival crowd, killing 58 people in just 11 minutes.

The agency said the device could turn legally obtained semi-automatic firearms into illegal machine guns and issued a ban, requiring the ATF to prohibit the sale and possession of the devices.

Cargill sued the agency, claiming the ATF overstepped its authority when interpreting a statute on machine guns to include bump stocks.

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