The Supreme Court Turns The U.S. Into A 3rd World Country By Legalizing Machine guns

In a 6-3 decision, the US Supreme Court on Friday overturned a federal rule imposed by the Trump administration banning bump stocks.

The court split down ideological lines, with the three liberal justices dissenting.

The rule was changed following the mass shooting in Las Vegas, where a man using semiautomatic weapons equipped with bump stocks killed 58 people and injured hundreds more.

The Supreme Court held that the NFA’s definition of “machinegun” clearly does not cover bump stocks, and thus that the ATF exceeded its statutory authority by classifying bump stock as such.

Bump stocks, the Court determined, are not machineguns because (1) they do not enable semiautomatic firearms to fire more than one shot

“by a single function of the trigger,”

(2) and even if they did, the firearm would not be firing “automatically.” Rather, the Court explained,

“[a] bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate ‘functions’ of the trigger.”

In the case Garland v, Cargill, the plaintiff, Michael Cargill, filed a lawsuit challenging the rule change by arguing that ATF did not have the statutory authority to promulgate the rule change because a bump stock is not a machine gun.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court agreed.

The National Firearms Act defines a “machinegun” as

“any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger,”

including any

“part designed and intended solely and exclusively . . . for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun.”

The ATF long classified bump stocks—which enable rapid fire with semiautomatic firearms while still requiring multiple functions of the trigger—as non-machineguns.

In 2018, the Trump administration amended the rules of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to clarify that bump stocks fall within the definition of “machinegun” because the device allows a shooter to fire continually with a single trigger pull.