(Washington) The nine judges of the American Supreme Court on Wednesday revealed their giddiness over the question of the legality of “bump stocks”, a device that increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles, transforming them de facto into machine guns.
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 1er October 2017. Most of the 22 rifles owned by the perpetrator of this carnage were equipped with them and he was thus able to fire at a rate of up to nine bullets per second.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), a federal agency, began reviewing its position on these detachable stocks in the wake of 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 pledged to ban “bump stocks”.
PHOTO ALLEN BREED, ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES
These accessories make it possible to “empty a 100-round magazine like those used in the Las Vegas massacre in approximately 10 seconds,” Brian Fletcher emphasized to the nine judges.
In December of the same year, the ATF announced that it would now consider “bump stocks” as machine guns, prohibited by a 1934 law, and ordered the holders to destroy them or hand them over to the authorities within 90 days.
” Al Capone ”
Following conflicting decisions by federal courts on the legality of this qualification, the Supreme Court with a conservative majority agreed to look into the question.
These accessories make it possible to “empty a 100-round magazine like those used in the Las Vegas massacre in approximately 10 seconds,” Brian Fletcher, on behalf of the Justice Department of Democratic President Joe’s administration, told the nine judges. Biden.
The debates, which lasted more than two hours, focused on the technical definition of a machine gun in the 1934 law, at the time of Prohibition, well before the invention of “bump stocks”.
“It’s a very old law, developed to respond to an obvious problem in the 1930s, with Al Capone…” recalled one of the conservative judges, Neil Gorsuch.
“Perhaps the legislators should have drafted their text better. We can hope that they will in the future, but this is the wording we have to deal with,” he added.
Jonathan Mitchell, the lawyer for the Texas arms dealer who attacked the ATF’s classification, also argued that it was “a decision for Congress, but certainly not for any court or agency.” administrative”.
“We believe that in 1934 Congress wrote this law not simply for the types of equipment that existed then, but for any kind of device that might be created in the future that would have the same effect” as a machine gun, replied Brian Fletcher.
“Flood of bullets”
Progressive Justice Elena Kagan defined herself as a “good textualist,” favoring an interpretation based on the letter of the law, but “at a certain point you have to put a little common sense into your reading of the law.” she told the arms seller’s lawyer.
However, with an automatic rifle as with a weapon equipped with one of these removable stocks, the shooter can release “a deluge of bullets,” she noted.
His conservative colleague Samuel Alito also asked the lawyer “why a legislator might want to ban machine guns but not bump stocks.”
The Supreme Court already had the opportunity in November to revisit a controversial ruling from June 2022. This proclaimed the right of citizens to carry a weapon outside their home, except for “reasonable” exceptions based in particular on the pre-existence of comparable restrictions. in “the history and traditions of the United States.”
On the basis of this new case law, an ultraconservative federal appeals court concluded in March 2023, for lack of historical precedents, that a federal law prohibiting people subject to a removal order for domestic violence from being detained is unconstitutional. a weapon.
The Supreme Court’s decision in this matter is expected by the end of the first half of the year.