The U.S. Supreme Court Is About To Hear Its Next Big Gun Case

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in a case that promises to settle the question of whether civilians can freely buy bump stocks, which allow shooters to fire off hundreds of rounds per minute.

Though Garland v. Cargill does not raise Second Amendment arguments, the case promises to offer a window into the conservative-tilted high court’s thinking on firearms after it issued a sweeping expansion of gun rights two years ago.

The bump stock case, brought by gun store owner and firearms instructor Mike Cargill in Austin, Texas, challenges a Trump administration rewrite of federal regulations that banned the device after it played a key role in the 2017 mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Music Fest in Las Vegas. With 60 deaths and more than 850 injuries, the Vegas massacre is the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history.

The case centers on whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) overstepped its authority when it issued a rule banning bump stocks.

Bump stocks slide back and forth, allowing the shooter to harness the power of a rifle’s recoil to fire faster. By pushing forward with the non-shooting hand and backward with the shooting hand, the shooter can force the trigger into their finger, allowing them to shoot more rapidly than when using the finger’s muscle alone.

The ATF had ruled since 2006 that springless bump stocks were legal. After the Vegas shooting, the Trump administration directed the bureau to revisit that classification. In 2019, the ATF reclassified bump stocks as modifications amounting to machine guns, which have been largely criminalized since the National Firearms Act of 1934.

Cargill surrendered two legally purchased bump