The high court will review a case challenging the legality of a controversial ATF rule.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday agreed to take up a case involving the Trump-era ban on “bump stocks” that was initiated in the wake of the Las Vegas mass shooting.
The justices agreed to hear arguments early next year over the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) rule, which was implemented in 2017. The case pertains to whether the Department of Justice, which oversees the ATF, followed federal law in changing the regulation around bump stocks, which are able to increase the rate of fire in some semiautomatic weapons.
Federal appeals courts have come to different decisions on whether the ATF regulation defining a bump stock as a machine gun accords with federal law. In 2010, under the Obama administration, the agency found that a bump stock should not be classified as a machine gun and therefore should not be banned under federal law.
A 1986 federal law prohibits Americans from owning fully automatic weapons or parts that are used to convert other firearms into automatic weapons, although some exceptions were made to fully automatic firearms produced before May 1986. The ATF in 2018 said that bump stocks fall under the regulation of the 1986 law.
The ATF policy went into effect in 2019 after the U.S. Supreme Court declined to issue an order to block it. In October 2022, the U.S. high court turned away two previous cases brought by gun rights advocates challenging the ban.
Opponents of the bump stock ban said that the legal definition of a machine gun has been distorted and argue that courts shouldn’t defer to the ATF’s interpretation of the rule. They have also argued that an individual needs to lean in and apply pressure to the stock of a gun fitted with a bump stock to get it to work, differing from how an automatic weapon, such as a machine gun, works.
