In a ruling that brought joy to gun rights advocates and induced groans among those who thought federal agencies had the power to interpret laws without Congress first chiseling them in stone, the U.S. Supreme Court has declared that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) might have slightly overstepped its bounds when it decided to classify bump stocks as illegal machine guns.
Writing for the 6–3 majority in Garland v. Cargill, Justice Clarence Thomas explained that bump stocks, the controversial plastic attachments that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire at speeds that make most ears ring and most lawmakers twitch, do not turn a rifle into a machine gun under existing federal law. According to Thomas, the mechanism behind bump stocks does not allow a gun to fire more than one round per trigger pull and thus fails the dictionary definition laid out by legislators who apparently had a far more restrained sense of firepower back in 1934.
Justice Samuel Alito chimed in with a concurring opinion that could only be interpreted as a pointed nudge to Congress. Alito essentially said that while bump stocks may be dangerous, the responsibility to ban them lies squarely with lawmakers. Translation: If you do not like the ruling, maybe write a law instead of a strongly worded regulation.
The case revolves around a device that gained national notoriety following the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, where a lone gunman used bump stocks to unleash gunfire into a concert crowd, killing 60 people and injuring hundreds more. In response, the ATF reinterpreted the National Firearms Act and declared that bump stocks fell under the umbrella of machine guns, thus making them illegal. That reinterpretation came after decades of saying otherwise, prompting skeptics to raise a brow and litigants to raise lawsuits.
The ATF, once firm in its previous assessments, reversed course in 2018 following a slight push from then President Trump, marking a rare moment of bipartisan hand-wringing. But the Supreme Court balked at this sudden epiphany, suggesting that perhaps shifting legal definitions should be handled by people who actually pass laws for a living and not by bureaucrats armed with semicolons and sudden inspiration.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, writing for the minority in what reads like a very exasperated dissent, accused the majority of gutting a common-sense safety measure. She argued that the mechanical effect of bump stocks mimics that of a machine gun and that legal hair-splitting is cold comfort to victims of mass shootings.
The ruling has put the ball squarely back in Congress’s court, a place where legislative action often goes to reflect, take a long nap, and occasionally resurface during election years. Until lawmakers decide whether to write new statutes or continue issuing thoughts and prayers, bump stocks will stay off the machine gun roster, at least in the eyes of the law.
In the end, it appears the only thing firing automatically these days is partisan disagreement.