First, they expanded gun rights, then they dealt a blow to a gun rights group; the U.S. Supreme Court pleased gun owners with a major decision in June, then on Monday, declined to hear a challenge to a federal ban on devices called “bump stocks” enthralling the left that controls on Americans would be in place.
“The -SCOTUS is a conservative political tool- crowd been real quiet,” one Daily Caller journalist noted after the verdict came down about the Bump stocks.
Today, the Supreme Court denied the cert petitions in two lawsuits we’re watching that challenged the federal bump stock ban: https://t.co/YTmiOf3Zb2 pic.twitter.com/eiletn34SK
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) October 3, 2022
“The justices turned away appeals by a Utah gun lobbyist named Clark Aposhian and firearms rights groups of lower court rulings upholding the ban as a reasonable interpretation of a federal law prohibiting machine gun possession,” Reuters reported, adding:
“At issue was the action by former President Donald Trump Trump’s administration to reclassify bump stocks as prohibited machine guns under U.S. law in a policy that went into effect in 2019.
Bump stocks use a gun’s recoil to bump its trigger, enabling a semiautomatic weapon to fire hundreds of rounds per minute to let it shoot like a machine gun. Trump pledged to ban them soon after a gunman used semiautomatic weapons outfitted with bump stock devices in a shooting spree that killed 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas.”
“The decision not to hear the two related cases, a blow for gun rights activists, leaves the ban in place. The conservative-majority court issued a major ruling in June that expanded gun rights, although the legal issues in the bump stock cases were different,” NBC News reported.
“The ban, implemented by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, went into effect in 2019 after the Supreme Court declined to block it. Since then, the already conservative court has tilted further to the right, with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, replacing liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020,” the outlet added.
NBC News reported:
The bump stocks challenge, however, did not deal directly with the scope of the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment. The challengers instead said the government did not have authority to ban bump stocks under the National Firearms Act, a law enacted in 1934 to regulate machine guns. In 1968, the Gun Control Act expanded the definition of machine gun to include accessories “for use in converting a weapon” into a machine gun, and the ATF concluded when it issued the ban that bump stocks meet that definition.
The groups challenging the ban said the legal definition of machine gun has been distorted beyond recognition and argue that courts should not defer to the federal agency’s interpretation.
The court turned away two related appeals, one brought by Clark Aposhian, a Utah gun lobbyist who had purchased a bump stock before the ban took effect, and another led by Gun Owners of America and other gun rights groups. Lower courts upheld the ban, although judges on the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Cincinnati-based 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals were divided in both cases.
Cam Edwards voiced concern about the decision:
To say this is a disappointing result would be putting it mildly, and there most certainly will be consequences to the justices’ refusal to hear either case. The Biden administration has already used the same executive authority that then-President Trump used to direct the ATF to craft its bump stock ban to target unfinished frames and receivers sold in DIY gun-making kits, and the Court’s inaction will only embolden anti-gun officials and the gun control lobby to further abuse the scope of executive branch authority to impose even more gun control laws that don’t have enough support to win congressional approval.
The decision is also very bad news for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who lawfully purchased bump stocks before the ATF suddenly reversed course and declared them to be machine guns. Possession of a bump stock is now the same as possessing a machine gun in terms of federal law, which makes any gun owner who still owns one of the devices subject to a $250,000 fine and the possibility of up to a decade in federal prison.
Back in June, the Supreme Court issued its most significant pro-Second Amendment decision in nearly two decades when justices ruled 6-3 that New York’s concealed carry law was unconstitutionally restrictive.
The ruling, experts say, is significant because it means similarly restrictive concealed carry laws, limited primarily to blue states, are also likely to be successfully challenged.
The Second Amendment “protect[s] an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion for the ruling.
The Denver case will now return to the federal District Court, where arguments will center on whether existing law gives the government the authority to regulate bump stocks, said Rich Samp, attorney for the New Civil Liberties Alliance. Samp said he will argue the “bump stock ban is inconsistent with the statutory definition of a ‘machine gun.’”
Samp also argued the case before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. He urged judges to throw out the ban due to the lack of authority of the executive branch to interpret the statute. Samp said it is Congress, not federal agencies, that have jurisdiction to write gun laws.
