WASHINGTON ¨C The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declared unlawful a federal ban on ¡°bump stock¡± devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns, rejecting yet another firearms restriction ¡ª this time one enacted under Republican former President Donald Trump.
The justices, in a 6-3 ruling authored by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, upheld a lower court¡¯s decision siding with Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban by claiming that a U.S. agency improperly interpreted a federal law banning machine guns as extending to bump stocks. The conservative justices were in the majority, with the liberal justices dissenting.
The rule was imposed in 2019 by Trump¡¯s administration after the devices were used during a 2017 mass shooting that killed 58 people at a Las Vegas country music festival.
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