In the wake of the massacre that left 58 dead and more than 400 injured during a concert in Las Vegas in October 2017, Donald Trump gave the green light to a rule allowing the bureau of alcohol, tobacco, weapons Fire and Explosives (ATF) to prohibit the sale and possession of “bump stocks”, a device allowing burst firing with semi-automatic rifles. It was a rare measure adopted by the Republican president to reduce gun violence in his country.
However, in a decision rendered this Friday by 6 votes to 3 and written by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the federal agency had exceeded its authority by prohibiting “bump stocks” which, it is necessary repeat, can turn an AR-15 like the one in the photo above into a “machine gun,” according to the ATF.
Never mind.
“A bump stock does not turn a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a lightning-fast finger shooter does,” the conservative judge wrote in his opinion. “Even with a bump stock, a semi-automatic rifle only fires one shot for each “trigger function.” »
In a dissenting opinion supported by her colleagues Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “Today, the Court puts bump stocks back into civilian hands. It does so by rejecting Congress’s definition of “machine gun” and retaining one that does not conform to the plain meaning of the statute and is not supported by the context or purpose. When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and chatters like a duck, I call it a duck. A semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump-stock “automatically fires more than one shot, without manual reloading, with a single pull of the trigger.” §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, consider it a machine gun, I respectfully disagree. »
In principle, Congress could resolve this issue by changing the law to specifically ban bump stocks. I don’t need to specify what will happen in practice.
(Photo Getty Images)
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