Supreme Court overturns Trump's ban on adding 'bump stocks' to certain semi-automatic firearms

Enacted by the Trump Administration, the veto was made after one of these weapons was used in a shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people.

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Rosana Rábago Sainz

14 de junio, 2024

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This Friday, the Supreme Court annulled the ban on "bump stocks" that can be added to certain semi-automatic firearms. Enacted by the Trump administration, the ban was made after one of these guns was used in a shooting in Las Vegas that killed 58 people.

This accessory, NBC News details, allows semi-automatic rifles to fire more quickly and, until now, was illegal. However, a 6 to 3 ruling stated that the law that prohibits machine guns cannot include these shock stocks since, Justice Clarence Thomas assured, it does not meet the definition of a "machine gun" that the federal law provides since, really, it is a firearm equipped with an accessory.

However, the ban did not have everyone's approval. Judge Sonia Sotomayor was one of them. The judge read a summary of her dissent in court in which she assured that the measure did not take into account how dangerous this accessory could be:

When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger’ … Because I, like Congress, call that a machine gun, I respectfully dissent.

Organizations for and against guns oppose the Supreme Court decision

She is not the only one. Gun safety organizations like Sandy Hook Promise said this addition only serves to make rifles even more deadly. The situation reached such a level that even the National Rifle Association, one of the most pro-gun organizations in the country, joined the petition to once again remove these shock stocks from the market.

Also joining the petition was the gun safety organization Everytown. Its president, John Feinblatt, assured The Guardian that this supplement should be banned again:

Guns outfitted with bump stocks fire like machine guns, they kill like machine guns, and they should be banned like machine guns – but the supreme court just decided to put these deadly devices back on the market. We urge Congress to right this wrong and pass bipartisan legislation banning bump stocks, which are accessories of war that have no place in our communities.