Supreme Court overturns ban on burst-fire accessory

UNITED STATES – This is a decision that will delight many gun defenders across the Atlantic. This Friday, June 14, the American Supreme Court overturned a federal regulation banning “bump stocks,” a device that increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles, transforming them de facto into machine guns.

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 “bump stocks” in 2018 in the category of machine guns, prohibited by a law from 1934, at the time of Prohibition.

“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 text of the 1934 law, adopted well before the invention of this device.

The 2017 Las Vegas massacre

The backdrop to this affair is the Las Vegas massacre, the worst in modern US history, in which 58 people were killed and more than 500 injured on October 1, 2017. Most of the 22 guns in 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 nine bullets per second.

The ATF had begun to review its position on these detachable stocks following this tragedy.

In February 2018, a few days after a shooting at a Florida high school, where 17 people died, the administration of then-Republican President Donald Trump committed to banning “bump stocks”.

In December of the same year, the ATF announced that it would now consider “bump stocks” as machine guns, ordering the holders to destroy them or turn them over to the authorities within 90 days.

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