First, they expanded gun rights, and then they dealt a blow to a gun rights group; the U.S. Supreme Court pleased gun owners with a major decision in June, and then on Monday, declined to hear a challenge to a federal ban on devices known as “bump stocks,” enthralling the left with the prospect that controls on Americans would be implemented.
“The -SCOTUS is a conservative political tool- crowd been real quiet,” a Daily Caller journalist remarked following the Bump stock judgment.
Today, the Supreme Court denied the cert petitions in two lawsuits we're watching that challenged the federal bump stock ban: https://t.co/YTmiOf3Zb2 pic.twitter.com/eiletn34SK
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) October 3, 2022
“The justices turned away appeals by a Utah gun lobbyist named Clark Aposhian and firearms rights groups of lower court rulings upholding the ban as a reasonable interpretation of a federal law prohibiting machine gun possession,” Reuters reported, adding:
“At issue was the action by former President Donald Trump Trump’s administration to reclassify bump stocks as prohibited machine guns under U.S. law in a policy that went into effect in 2019.
Bump stocks use a gun’s recoil to bump its trigger, enabling a semiautomatic weapon to fire hundreds of rounds per minute to let it shoot like a machine gun. Trump pledged to ban them soon after a gunman used semiautomatic weapons outfitted with bump stock devices in a shooting spree that killed 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas.”
“The decision not to hear the two related cases, a blow for gun rights activists, leaves the ban in place. The conservative-majority court issued a major ruling in June that expanded gun rights, although the legal issues in the bump stock cases were different,” NBC News reported.
“The ban, implemented by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, went into effect in 2019 after the Supreme Court declined to block it. Since then, the already conservative court has tilted further to the right, with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, replacing liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020,” the outlet added.
However, the bump stock case did not directly address the extent of the Second Amendment right to carry weapons. In contrast, the challengers argued that the government lacked the jurisdiction to restrict bump stocks under the National Firearms Act, a 1934 legislation that regulates machine weapons. In 1968, the Gun Control Act broadened the definition of machine gun to include accessories “for use in turning a weapon” into a machine gun, and the ATF determined that bump stocks satisfy this description when it imposed the ban.
The parties opposing the prohibition contend that the legal definition of a machine gun has been warped beyond recognition and that the courts should not default to the interpretation of the federal agency.
More on this story via The Republic Brief:
The court turned away two related appeals, one brought by Clark Aposhian, a Utah gun lobbyist who had purchased a bump stock before the ban took effect, and another led by Gun Owners of America and other gun rights groups. Lower courts upheld the ban, although judges on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals were divided in both cases. CONTINUE READING…