As a top journalist covering the legal landscape, I bring your attention to a crucial gun-rights case that the Supreme Court has included in its docket for the 2023-24 term – the Garland v. Cargill dispute concerning ‘bump stocks’.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a ‘bump stock’ is an attachment that alters a semi-automatic rifle to work like a fully automatic, assault-style weapon. The key issue the justices will address is whether a ‘bump stock’ qualifies as a ‘machinegun’, an entity largely forbidden under federal law. The legal wrangling comes on the back of the mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017, in which the culprit used semi-automatic rifles equipped with bump-stock devices, leading to 60 casualties and over 500 injuries.
In reaction to the Las Vegas carnage, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives issued a rule reclassifying bump stocks as machineguns – a stark contrast to its earlier stance that only certain forms of bump stocks were machine guns. This rule mandated all bump stock owners to either destroy their devices or turn them over to a nearby ATF office to avoid penalisation.
However, this regulation was struck down in two federal appeals courts. The machinegun, as per federal law, is a firearm that discharges multiple bullets ‘automatically’ through ‘a single function of the trigger’, or ancillary equipment facilitating the same. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit asserts, bump stocks, which leverage a rifle’s recoil to swiftly depress the trigger without the shooter pulling and releasing his trigger finger, clearly do not fit this definition. Any potential ambiguity, the 5th Circuit adds, should interpret ‘machinegun’ in ways most suited to defendants under the lenity rule.
In a separate dispute, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit echoed these sentiments, affirming the federal firearms law’s ambiguity regarding the prohibition of bump stocks. Hence, the 6th Circuit ruled in favor of the defendant following the lenity rule. Contrarily, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld the regulation, deeming bump stocks as self-regulating mechanisms enabling a shooter to fire multiple shots through a single trigger pull, thus qualifying as ‘machineguns’.
These conflicting rulings led the Biden administration to appeal to the Supreme Court, seeking a review of the rulings against them by the 5th and 6th Circuits. Concurrently, bump stock owners who were unsuccessful in the D.C. Circuit also requested a review of that ruling.
The Supreme Court has also agreed to hear National Rifle Association v. Vullo and Coinbase v. Suski in addition to the ‘bump stock’ dispute, ensuring an eventful 2023-24 term for the court.
This summary is based on the original article, ‘Justices take up bump stock dispute’, by Amy Howe on SCOTUSblog.