The United States Supreme Court on Friday struck down a federal regulation banning “ bump stocks », a device that increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles, transforming them de facto into automatic weapons.
By six votes to three, those of the conservative justices against those of the progressives, the Court affirmed that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a federal agency, had exceeded its authority by reclassifying in 2018 the bump stocks
in the category of machine guns, prohibited by a law of 1934, at the time of Prohibition.
We consider that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a submachine gun because it cannot fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger
writes Judge Clarence Thomas on behalf of the majority, referring to the text of the 1934 law, adopted well before the invention of this device.
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The “bump stock” or percussion stock allows burst firing with semi-automatic weapons designed to fire only one shot per pull of the trigger.
Photo: AP / Steve Helber
The backdrop to this affair is the Las Vegas massacre, the worst in modern US history, in which 59 people were killed and more than 500 injured on October 1, 2017. Most of the 22 weapons of the The perpetrator of this carnage were equipped with these removable stocks and he was thus able to fire at a rate of up to 9 bullets per second.
L’ATF had begun to review its position on these removable stocks following this tragedy.
In February 2018, a few days after a killing in a high school in Florida (southeast), where 17 people died, the administration of the then Republican president, Donald Trump, committed to banning bump stocks
.
In December of the same year, theATF had announced that it would now consider the bump stocks
like machine guns, ordering the holders to destroy them or hand them over to the authorities within 90 days.
