The United States Supreme Court on Friday 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 in 2018 “bump stocks” (or removable burst firing stocks) 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 the Judge Clarence Thomas on behalf of the majority, referring to the text of the 1934 law, adopted well before the invention of this device.
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 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 massacre in a high school in Florida (southeast), where 17 people died, the administration of the then Republican president, Donald Trump, committed to banning removable shooting stocks. in bursts.
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.