Posts Tagged bump stock

SCOTUS Bump Stock Opinion Breakdown

From Open Source Defense:

On Friday the Supreme Court struck down the ATF’s bump stock ban. Let’s break down the justices’ opinions and the implications.

Clarence Thomas writes for a 6-3 majority, and the overriding theme of his opinion is that this is not a hard case. Under the NFA, a machine gun is “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”. Bump stocks are simply not that. That’s obvious if and only if you know how a bump stock works. Thomas explains that by explaining how an AR-15’s fire control group works.

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SCOTUS Nixes Bump Stock Ban

From The Truth About Guns:

In his opinion for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote what most people who understand and are familiar with firearms have been thinking all along.

“Semi-automatic firearms, which require shooters to reengage the trigger for every shot, are not machine guns,” Justice Thomas wrote. “This case asks whether a bump stock—an accessory for a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire)—converts the rifle into a ‘machine gun.’ We hold that it does not.

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Supreme Court Justices Reveal Their Ignorance On Guns In Oral Arguments

From The Federalist:

The key differences between automatic and semiautomatic weapons with bump stocks were largely lost on the justices, especially Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan, who repeatedly insisted bump stock-equipped guns can fire up to 800 rounds a second. They, along with the government’s legal team, repeated the lie that semiautomatic rifles with modifiers could fire hundreds of shots (in Kagan’s words, “a torrent of bullets”) each moment. Cargill lawyer Johnathan Mitchell corrected them multiple times.

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Supreme Court To Hear Bump Stock Case

From The Truth About Guns:

Time to lay in a heavier supply of popcorn. Today the Supreme Court granted cert in Cargill v. Garland, the case challenging the Trump era bump stock ban. The about face by the ATF following the Las Vegas mass shooting came at the direction of the Trump administration. ATF, which had previously approved sales of bump fire stocks as legal accessories used regulatory fiat to do a 180 and reclassify them as machine guns.

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Court Stops Bump Stock Ban

From Ammoland:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit overwhelmingly ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) overstepped its authority when it published a Final Rule that classified bump stocks as “machineguns.” The Trump-era ban was in reaction to the heinous crimes by a depraved murderer in Las Vegas in 2017. The murderer used bump stocks in the commission of his crimes.

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Supreme Court Dismisses Gun Cases

From Bearing Arms:

For the third time this year the Supreme Court has rejected a case dealing with the ATF’s administratively imposed ban on bump stocks, denying cert in a challenge to the ban brought by a group of federally licensed firearm retailers and several individuals who argued that the ban was an unconstitutional violation of the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause by forcing existing bump stock owners to destroy them without any kind of compensation on the part of the federal government.

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Military Court Says Bump Stocks Are Not Machine Guns

From Ammoland:

Marine Corp Private Ali Akazahg was convicted of possessing two machine guns, in violation of Articles 83, 107, and 134 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice [UCMJ]. These “machine guns” that Private Akazahg processed were bump stocks. The Private’s defense counsel argued that bump stocks did not meet the federal definition of machine guns. The ruling is found here and embedded below. US Military Courts Rules Bump Stocks Are Not Machine Guns.

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Supreme Court Refuses Bump Stock Case

From Associated Press:

The high court on Monday turned away a challenge to the ban, which took effect in October 2018. A lower court had dismissed the challenge at an early stage and that decision had been upheld by an appeals court. As is typical, the court didn’t comment in declining to take the case.

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Court: Bump Stock Ban Unconstitutional

From The Federalist:

A divided federal appeals court in Ohio ruled that former President Donald Trump’s ban on bump stocks is unconstitutional and should no longer be enforced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

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First Bump Stock As A Machine Gun Prosecution Dropped

From Houston Chronicle:

A federal prosecutor withdrew the unique charge before the trial began for a Houston man accused of owning the device. However, the defense was prepared to call an ATF expert to testify that bump stocks, attachments that cause a rifle to fire more rapidly, do not render a semiautomatic gun a machine gun.

Experts had conflicting views on the matter, said defense attorney Tom Berg. But Rick Vasquez, a retired ATF agent and firearms expert, would have told the court the bump stock did not meet the statutory definition of a machine gun. The prosecution dismissed case, he said, because the government couldn’t prove beyond a reasonable doubt the bump stock was a machine gun.

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Trump Appointed Judges Slam Bump Stock Rule

From Reason:

Gorsuch just got some company. This week, Judge Brantley Starr, a Trump appointee who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, issued an opinion in Lane v. United States that basically accused the Justice Department of ignoring basic principles of constitutional governance in its defense of the Trump administration’s bump stock ban.

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GOA Continues Fight Against Bump Stock Ban

From Ammoland:

In particular, one appellate judge was very concerned that, in the future, the “ATF could choose to redefine ‘machine gun’ as including all semiautomatic weapons that can be modified with a device like a bump stock.”
Of course, this is exactly the point that GOA has made in its briefs to the court. If the ATF can claim that a bump stock can turn an AR-15 into a machine gun, then the same can be said about rubber bands or belt loops.

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Judge Dismisses Compensation Lawsuit For Bump Stocks

A federal claims court this week dismissed a lawsuit from bump stock owners that had alleged the U.S. government was improperly forcing them to destroy their devices without compensation.
Bump stock owners filed the $500,000 lawsuit in March, after a federal reclassification of bump stocks as machine guns effectively outlawed their possession. The reclassification was prompted by the October 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas.

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Surrendering Banned Items Could Place You On A List

From News Target:

In Washington state, for example, people received $150 for every bump stock they turned over to state police. The program attracted a lot of people; violators could face thousands of dollars worth of fines and as many as ten years in prison.
Now, however, their names and other personal information are about to be revealed to the public. Someone has filed a Public Records Act request to obtain the names and addresses of the people who surrendered their bump stocks as part of the program.

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Bump Stock Manufacturers Sue Feds

From Guns.com:

Two former retailers of now-banned bump stock devices are suing the federal government for damages they incurred after having to destroy their inventory.
The plaintiffs include two companies, Minnesota’s Modern Sportsman and Texas-based RW Arms, as well as two individuals, Mark Maxwell and Michael Stewart, who in all lost 74,995 bump stocks to the ban which took effect late last month. The case, filed in a Washington, D.C. federal court, argues that the ban’s requirement that bump-stocks be surrendered or destroyed within a 90-day period, with no opportunity for registration, violated the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment which states that private property can’t be taken for public use without compensation.

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