Supreme Court to Consider Whether Bump Stocks Violate Federal Law

A bump fire stock that attaches to a semiautomatic rifle to increase the firing rate is seen at Good Guys Gun Shop in Orem, Utah, on Oct. 4, 2017. (George Frey/Reuters)

The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments on Feb. 28 in the case of Garland v. Cargill, which concerns whether a bump stock transforms a semiautomatic firearm into the type of “machine gun” prohibited under federal law.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) said for years that nonmechanical bump stocks, or those without internal springs, didn’t constitute a machine gun since they didn’t produce automatic fire.

However, the ATF changed its position in 2018 after the mass shooting in Las Vegas when a gunman used devices equipped with bump stocks to kill 58 people.

Michael Cargill, host of the “Come and Talk It” radio show, sued the ATF over its 2018 interpretation, alleging that it violated a portion of the Administrative Procedures Act. Although he lost in two lower court decisions, the Fifth Circuit ultimately ruled in his favor in an en banc, or full court, decision.

In a 13–3 vote, the Fifth Circuit reversed the lower court decision, stating that “an act of Congress is required to prohibit bump stocks.” Eight judges thought that the law unambiguously failed to cover nonmechanical bump stocks, while 12 opined that the rule of lenity required reversal.

The rule of lenity generally directs courts to rule against the government and for a defendant when the law is ambiguous.

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Despite winning, Mr. Cargill is requesting that the Supreme Court accept the Justice Department’s (DOJ’s) request for it to consider his case. Both parties note that other circuits have issued conflicting rulings on how to classify bump stocks.

Defining ‘Automatic’

The litigation is perhaps not surprising, as the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) warned that the ATF’s rulemaking would result in lawsuits.

“Here’s the bottom line,” she said in a 2017 statement. “The ATF lacks authority under the law to ban bump-fire stocks. Period. The agency made this crystal clear in 2010 and again in a 2013 letter to Congress, writing that ’stocks of this type are not subject to the provisions of federal firearms statutes.'”

In requesting a Supreme Court review, the Justice Department defended the ATF’s rulemaking and said that the agency’s final rule in 2018 was the correct interpretation of federal law.

Much of the debate over bump stocks surrounds Congress’ decision to define machine guns as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

The ATF previously confronted the issue in 2006 after a ban on certain semiautomatic rifles, often called “assault weapons,” expired.

According to the DOJ, the ATF said that when combined with a firearm, the Akins Accelerator—the original bump stock designed by a man named Bill Akins—created a machine gun because it contained a spring that harnessed recoil energy to create a back-and-forth motion, thus initiating an “automatic firing sequence” with the first trigger pull.

‘Single Function of the Trigger’

The ATF also said that “single function of the trigger” under federal law included a “single pull of the trigger.”

At the time, it said removing the device’s internal spring “would render the device a non-machinegun under the statutory definition.” That changed in 2018, however, as the ATF’s new rule said that the spring exception did “not reflect the best interpretation of the term ‘machinegun.'”

Now, the DOJ is defending the idea that all bump stocks fall under the definition of machine guns because they allow a gun to fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) points to a photograph of a rifle with a "bump stock" during a news conference to announce proposed gun control legislation at the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Oct. 4, 2017. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Mr. Cargill disagreed, arguing that a firearm couldn’t be a machine gun “if something more is required of the shooter than a single function of the trigger to produce more than one shot.” His brief noted that the ATF’s Final Rule acknowledged the need “to place ‘forward pressure on the barrel-shroud or fore-grip of the rifle’ while simultaneously ’maintaining the trigger finger on the device’s ledge with constant rearward pressure.'”

Mr. Cargill added that the ATF defied common sense by arguing that a process could still be automatic even if it required “additional human input.”

“When [federal law] states that a weapon is a machinegun if it fires multiple rounds ‘automatically’ based on ‘a single function of the trigger,’ that provision is properly read as excluding weapons that will fire multiple rounds only if the shooter undertakes a task in addition to effecting a single function of the trigger,” his brief read.