The Supreme Court agreed Friday to decide whether a Trump-era ban on stocks, gun accessories that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns, violates federal law.
The justices will hear arguments early next year on a regulation implemented by the Justice Department after a mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017.
Federal appeals courts have reached different decisions on whether the regulation defining a stock as a machine gun complies with federal law.
The judges said they will review the Biden administration’s appeal of a ruling by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans that invalidated the ban.
The Supreme Court is already weighing challenging another federal law that seeks to keep guns away from people under domestic violence restraining orders, a case that arises from the landmark 2022 decision in which the six-justice conservative majority expanded the rights to carry arms.
The new case is not about the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms,” but rather whether the Trump administration followed federal law in changing regulations on bump weapons.
Federal appeals courts have reached different decisions on whether the regulation defining a bump stock as a machine gun complies with federal law.
The emergency stock ban came into effect in 2019.
It emerged from the Las Vegas shooting in which the gunman, a 64-year-old retired postal service worker and high-risk gambler, used assault rifles to fire more than 1,000 bullets in 11 minutes into a crowd of 22,000 music fans.
Most rifles were equipped with stock devices and high-capacity magazines. A total of 58 people were killed in the shooting and two died later. Hundreds were injured.
The Trump administration’s ban on firearms was a sea change for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
The Las Vegas shooting took place in 2017, when a 64-year-old retired postal service worker and high-risk gambler used assault rifles to fire more than 1,000 bullets in 11 minutes into a crowd of 22,000 music fans. attend a candlelight memorial for a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police officer who died during the shooting on October 1, 2017. AFP/Getty Images
In 2010, under the Obama administration, the agency determined that a stock should not be classified as a machine gun and therefore should not be banned under federal law.
After the Las Vegas shooting, officials reviewed that determination and found it incorrect.
The stocks harness the recoil energy of a semi-automatic firearm so that a trigger “resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter,” according to the ATF.
A custom-made semi-automatic hunting rifle with a high-capacity detachable magazine is displayed at a gun store in Rocklin, California, Oct. 3, 2013. AP The interior of Stephen Paddock’s 32nd floor room at the Mandalay Hotel Bay after the shooting in October 2017.AP
A shooter must maintain constant forward pressure on the gun with the non-firing hand and constant pressure on the trigger with the finger on the trigger, according to court records.
The full U.S. Fifth Circuit ruled 13-3 in January that Congress would have to change federal law to prohibit bump stocks.
“The definition of ‘machine gun’ set forth in the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act does not apply to firearms,” wrote Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod for the Fifth Circuit.
But a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Washington examined the same text and reached a different conclusion.
An undated photo of Stephen Paddock, the gunman behind the Las Vegas shooting.AP The Supreme Court’s decision is expected in early summer in Garland v. Cargill, 22-976.AP
Judge Robert Wilkins wrote for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that “under the best interpretation of the statute, a bump stock is a self-regulating mechanism that allows a shooter to fire more than one shot with a just pull the trigger.
As such, it is a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and the Gun Control Act.”
A decision is expected early this summer in Garland v. Cargill, 22-976.
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Source: vtt.edu.vn