The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday declared illegal a federal ban on “bump stock” devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns. It rejected yet another gun restriction — this time enacted under Republican former President Donald Trump.
The justices, in a 6-3 ruling written by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas, upheld a lower court’s decision and sided with Michael Cargill, a gun shop owner and gun rights advocate from Austin, Texas, who challenged the ban by claiming that a US agency wrongly interpreted a federal law banning machine guns as an expansion of stock prices. The conservative justices were in the majority, while the liberal justices disagreed.
The rule was imposed by the Trump administration in 2019 after the devices were used during a 2017 mass shooting that killed 58 people at a country music festival in Las Vegas.
