Supreme Court Rejects the Trump Administration’s Bump Stock Ban

The U.S. Supreme Court today ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) exceeded its statutory authority when it purported to ban bump stocks by classifying them as machine guns. Although the Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill does not involve the Second Amendment, it upholds the rule of law and the separation of powers by striking a blow against bureaucratic attempts to impose new gun controls without congressional approval. The bump stock ban is one of several such attempts, two of which faced judicial setbacks shortly before the Supreme Court’s bump stock ruling.

“This decision helps [rein] in an out-of-control federal government that has no respect for the People of the United States or our rights,” said Brandon Combs, president of the Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC). “The President cannot change the law to fit his policy preferences.”

The products targeted by the ATF rule that the Supreme Court rejected are designed to assist bump firing, which involves pushing a rifle forward to activate the trigger by bumping it against a stationary finger, then allowing recoil energy to push the rifle backward, which resets the trigger. As long as the shooter maintains the requisite amount of forward pressure and keeps his finger in place, the rifle will fire repeatedly. The “interpretive rule” at issue in this case, which was published in December 2018 and took effect three months later, banned stock replacements that facilitate this technique by allowing the rifle’s receiver to slide back and forth.

The National Firearms Act of 1934 “defines a ‘machinegun’ as any weapon capable of firing ‘automatically more than one shot…by a single function of the trigger,'” Justice Clarence Thomas notes in the majority opinion, which was joined by five of his colleagues. The definition also covers parts that are “designed and intended…for use in converting a weapon” into a machine gun. “We hold that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machinegun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,'” Thomas writes. And “even if it could, it would not do so ‘automatically.’ ATF therefore exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies bump stocks as machineguns.”

For nearly a decade, the ATF “took the position that semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump stocks were not machineguns under the statute,” Thomas notes. “On more than 10 separate occasions over several administrations, ATF consistently concluded that rifles equipped with bump stocks cannot ‘automatically’ fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.'” The dissenting opinion by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, which was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Kentaji Brown Jackson, glides over this illuminating history, which it mentions only in a footnote.

The ATF “abruptly reversed course,” Thomas notes, after a gunman used rifles equipped with bump stocks to kill 58 people at a Las Vegas music festival in October 2017. That horrifying crime inspired several bills that would have banned bump stocks. But President Donald Trump, who maintained that new legislation was unnecessary, instructed the ATF to impose a ban by administrative fiat. Because that approach contradicted the statutory definition of “machinegun” and the ATF’s longstanding interpretation of it, supporters of a legislative ban warned, it would inspire court challenges that were apt to succeed.

Because “the ATF lacks authority under the law to ban bump-fire stocks,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–California) said, “legislation is the only answer.” Noting that “the law has not changed,” Feinstein warned that “the gun lobby and manufacturers will have a field day” with the ATF’s “about face,” which relied partly on “a dubious analysis claiming that bumping the trigger is not the same as pulling it.”

Feinstein was right. After surrendering two bump stocks to the ATF under protest, Texas gun shop owner Michael Cargill filed a lawsuit challenging the rule in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas. Although a federal judge and a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld the rule, the appeals court reversed those rulings in an en banc decision last year.

“A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of ‘machinegun’ set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote in the majority opinion. And even if that were not true, Elrod said, “the rule of lenity,” which requires construing an ambiguous criminal statute in a defendant’s favor, would preclude the government from punishing people for owning bump stocks.

That decision clashed with a 2022 ruling in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that the ATF had followed “the best interpretation of the statute.” By contrast, a plurality of eight 5th Circuit judges agreed that the ATF had violated the plain meaning of the statute. In resolving that circuit split, the Supreme Court endorsed the latter view.

During oral arguments in February, Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian H. Fletcher conceded that “an expert” can bump-fire a rifle “without any assistive device at all” and that “you can also do it if you have a lot of expertise by hooking your finger into a belt loop or using a rubber band or something else like that to hold your finger in place.” Dodging the logical implication that all semiautomatic rifles are machine guns, the ATF maintained that the additional assistance offered by bump stocks made a crucial difference.

One problem with the ATF’s position was that semiautomatic rifles by definition fire just one round for each “function of the trigger.” With or without a bump stock, the trigger has to be released and reactivated to fire additional rounds.