A divided US Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday on the legality of “bump stocks,” simple devices that can allow rapid fire from otherwise semi-automatic guns.
The case stems from the worst mass shooting in US history, in October 2017, when a man fired on a crowd attending an outdoor music concert in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and wounding around 500.
Most of his 22 guns were equipped with bump stocks, allowing them to fire as many as nine bullets a second.
Even by US standards, where gun violence is common and there are more firearms than citizens, the Las Vegas massacre sparked shock.
In February 2018, following a mass shooting at a Florida high school which left 17 people dead, the Justice Department under Republican president Donald Trump moved to declare the detachable devices illegal.
In December of that year, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) revised its regulations on bump stocks, declaring that they fall under an existing 1934 law passed by Congress banning machine guns.
Lawyers for Michael Cargill, a gun seller from Texas, challenged the move claiming the ATF had overstepped its bounds in classifying bump stocks with machine guns.
In court on Wednesday, Brian Fletcher, deputy solicitor general in President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, said bump stocks allow a user to “empty a 100-round magazine like the ones used in the Las Vegas shooting in about 10 seconds.”
“Those weapons do exactly what Congress meant to prohibit when it enacted the prohibition on machine guns,” Fletcher said.
Oral arguments, which lasted some two hours, focused on the technical definition of a machine gun in the 1934 law, which was passed during the Prohibition era, well before the invention of the bump stock.
“It’s a very old statute, and it was designed for an obvious problem in the 1930s and Al Capone,” said Justice Neil Gorsuch.
“Maybe they should have written something better,” the conservative justice said. “One might hope they might write something better in the future, but that’s the language we’re stuck with.”
‘Torrent of bullets’
Jonathan Mitchell, representing the Texas bump stack manufacturer, said it was up to Congress to decide if the 1934 law applied to the devices.
“It’s certainly not a decision for a court or for an administrative agency that’s charged with implementing the instructions of Congress,” Mitchell said.
Fletcher, the government lawyer, disagreed.
“In short, we think Congress in 1934 wrote this statute not just for the kinds of devices that existed then, but for other kinds of devices that could be created in the future that would do the same thing,” he said.
Justice Elena Kagan, a liberal, said “a little bit of common sense” should be applied in reading the law.
“What this statute comprehends is a weapon that fires a multitude of shots with a single human action,” Kagan said.
Both a machine gun and a weapon equipped with a bump stock unleash a “torrent of bullets,” she said.
Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative and fierce defender of the Second Amendment, which guarantees Americans the right to own guns, expressed some confusion at one point with Mitchell’s arguments.
“Can you imagine a legislator thinking we should ban machine guns but we should not ban bump stocks?” he asked. “Is there any reason why a legislator might reach that judgment?”
“Stocks can help people who have disabilities, who have problems with finger dexterity people, who have arthritis in their fingers,” Mitchell replied.
The Supreme Court previously expanded gun rights in a 2022 ruling that said Americans have a fundamental right to carry a handgun in public, though certain regulations still exist around the practice.
A conservative federal appeals court ruled in March 2023 that a law barring people under domestic violence court orders from owning a gun was unconstitutional.
That case will also be decided by the Supreme Court this year. The justices seemed likely to uphold the domestic violence law when they heard arguments in November.
Polls show a majority of Americans favor stricter gun regulations, but the powerful firearms lobby and mobilized voters supporting the country’s strong firearms culture have made congressional action difficult.
