The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns and was used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
“A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate functions of the trigger,” Thomas wrote in an opinion that contained multiple drawings of guns’ firing mechanisms. The Biden administration said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made the right choice for the gun accessories, which can allow weapons to fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute.
Justices from the court’s liberal wing suggested it was “common sense” that anything capable of unleashing a “torrent of bullets” was a machine gun under federal law. Conservative justices, though, raised questions about why Congress had not acted to ban bump stocks, as well as the effects of the ATF changing its mind a decade after declaring the accessories legal.