SCOTUS Will Hear Arguments in Case Challenging Trump’s Bump Stock Ban Tomorrow

The same Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that had repeatedly told [Slide Fire bump stock inventor Jeremiah] Cottle between 2008 and 2017 that his bump stocks were not illegal “machine guns” did an about-face after the Vegas massacre.

At the direction of then-President Donald Trump, and backed by the National Rifle Association, the agency reclassified the devices and ordered that the more than 700,000 already created must be surrendered or destroyed.

“That somebody took action and said that we do not need these devices was a wonderful thing,” said Geena Springmann, Marano’s younger sister who is also a survivor of the Las Vegas shooting. “We need [bump stocks] to be regulated. This converts an assault weapon into a machine gun.”

Steve Kling, a retired Army commander of a small arms training unit and a gun safety advocate for the Giffords organization, said ATF’s reversal reflects a more accurate analysis of federal law.

“The spirit of the law is to prevent automatic weapons, weapons that have a significant cyclical rate of fire, from being on our streets and possessed by just anyone,” he said.

“I’ve fired a lot of automatic weapons, including ones with bump stocks. There’s no question that they’re fun. It’s fun to drive a supercar at 180 miles an hour down a highway. But we don’t allow that either,” Kling said.

Michael Cargill, an Army veteran and owner of Central Texas Gun Works outside Austin, cleared his store shelves of bump stocks after the ATF imposed the 2018 ban and surrendered two he owned himself. But he sued the agency in federal court and is leading the fight to get the devices back.

“This is a product that I legally purchased and had it in the store,” Cargill said in an interview at his shop, “and all of a sudden an agency within the federal government decided they’re going to ban this particular product. I said, ‘This is crazy, this is not the America that I know. We’ve got to do something about this.'”

Cargill insists a bump stock is a firearm accessory that does not render a semi-automatic weapon fully automatic and that the ATF overstepped its authority. He’s now asking the Supreme Court to strike down the agency’s ban.

“We need to follow the laws that we already have right now and not venture past that point,” Cargill said. “An agency within the federal government can’t come out and actually turn millions of people into felons overnight or ban a product. We have to go to Congress to do that.”

— Devin Dwyer, Patty See, and Bobby Gehlen in Machine Gun or Firearm Toy? Bump Stock Creator Speaks Out Ahead of Supreme Court Hearing on Ban