SCOTUS Hears Challenge to Bump Stock Ban

Facts

• The US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) on Wednesday heard oral arguments in Garland v. Cargill, which is a challenge to a Trump-era ban on bump stocks — devices that make it easier to rapidly and accurately fire a semi-automatic rifle.¹
• Michael Cargill, a gun store owner, argued that bump stocks don't change the main function of a semi-automatic weapon enough to make them illegal, while the Biden administration says bump stocks meet the definition of a machine gun, which are prohibited for personal ownership.²
• The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) included bump stocks as machine guns in an interpretive rule it issued after a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. The Trump administration banned the devices, and the Biden administration is defending the ban.³
• Justices from both sides of the political aisle challenged Cargill's lawyers' assertions, with liberal-leaning Elena Kagan saying the law, as written by Congress, anticipated and therefore included bump stocks in its ban.⁴
• Conservative-leaning Samuel Alito was also skeptical that Congress would write a law to ban machine guns but not devices that could create similar weapons.⁴
• However, a fellow conservative justice, Amy Coney Barrett, asked why Congress hadn't 'more clearly' acted to ban the bump stocks.⁵

Sources: ¹ABC News, ²Associated Press, ³FOX News, ⁴Roll Call and ⁵BBC News.

Narratives

• Right narrative, as provided by Daily Caller. The ATF's decision to treat bump stocks as machine guns is unconstitutional. Only Congress can make laws, and the administrative state is overreaching by suddenly defining devices that were legal from 2008 to 2017 as bannable. If gun-control advocates on the left want to push a ban on bump stock, they're free to do so through the legislative process — but gun rights advocates will then be able to challenge that on Second Amendment grounds.
• Left narrative, as provided by The Nation. It's unconscionable that those on the right side of the political aisle in the most violent industrialized nation on Earth are willing to allow these lethal devices to proliferate over a question of grammar. The ATF has the power to define what's a machine gun, and that means bump stocks are as bannable under this definition. If the conservative-majority SCOTUS doesn't rule that way, it'll be another sad chapter in the fight against excess gun deaths.

Predictions