The US Supreme Court has dealt a blow to efforts for greater gun control by overturning a ban on “bump stocks”, a device that increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles, which effectively converts them into machine guns.
Calls immediately grew for Congress to intervene to change the law.
The backdrop to this affair is the massacre in Las Vegas (west), the worst in modern American history, in which 58 people were killed and more than 500 injured on October 1, 2017. Most of the 22 rifles of the The perpetrator of the carnage were equipped with these removable stocks and he was thus able to fire up to nine bullets per second.
The Court’s six conservative justices, against the advice of the three progressives, concluded that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a federal agency, had exceeded its authority by reclassifying in 2018 “bump stocks” in the category of machine guns, prohibited by a law from 1934.
“We consider that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot with a ‘single pull of the trigger’.” writes Justice Clarence Thomas on behalf of the majority, referring to the letter of the law, adopted at the time of Prohibition, well before the invention of this device.
“Deadly consequences”
The Las Vegas massacre “demonstrated that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun and therefore strengthened the arguments in favor of revising this law,” recognizes conservative judge Samuel Alito for his part.
“But an event that highlights the need to amend the law does not by itself change the meaning of the law,” he adds, suggesting Congressional intervention to address this inconsistency.
Expressing her disagreement, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the two other progressives, criticizes the majority for “rejecting the commonly accepted definition” of machine guns. This decision “will have deadly consequences” by “hindering the government’s efforts to prevent shooters like the one in Las Vegas from having access,” she warns.
The Giffords association, which campaigns for strengthening control of individual weapons, deplored a “reckless and dangerous” decision, nevertheless recalling that “bump stocks” remained prohibited in at least 16 states.
“Congress must act to repair the damage and make clear that all automatic weapon conversion devices are illegal under federal law,” she said.
” Save lives “
Democratic President Joe Biden also urged “Congress to ban “bump stocks”, adopt a ban on assault weapons and act to save lives”, assuring that he would “immediately” sign any text to this effect.
The campaign of his Republican predecessor Donald Trump, whose administration was at the origin of the ban on “bump stocks”, welcomed the decision, assuring that in the face of crime, “the right to bear arms is “has never been so vital.”
The influential arms lobby, the NRA, from which Donald Trump received support against Joe Biden, also thanked the Court for having “precisely confined the agencies of the executive power to their role of enforcing the law, and not to write it.”
The ATF had begun to review its position on these detachable stocks following the Las Vegas tragedy.
Then in February 2018, a few days after a shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people died, the Trump administration pledged to ban them. Coincidentally, the American authorities began demolishing a building at this high school on Friday.
In December 2018, the ATF announced that it would now consider “bump stocks” as machine guns, ordering holders to destroy them or turn them over to the authorities within 90 days.