Fifth Court of Appeals Rules Against ATF Bump Stock Ban
The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, stating that the ATF’s decision to categorize a bump stock as a machine gun is inaccurate.
When bump stocks went into production in the early 2000s, the ATF made a distinction between mechanical and non-mechanical bump stocks. According to the National Firearms Act, a machine gun is defined 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.” Under this definition, mechanical bump stocks were categorized as machine guns and were subject to the conditions of the National Firearms Act.
Non-mechanical bump stocks, however, remained legal. The ATF did not categorize them as machine guns because “the shooter must apply constant forward pressure with the non-shooting hand and constant rearward pressure with the shooting hand.” Non-mechanical bump stocks use the gun’s recoil to help the shooter pull the trigger quicker, but it still requires the shooter to pull the trigger for each round being fired. Therefore, they were not subject to the National Firearm Act’s definition of a machine gun.
But in response to the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, the ATF broadened its definition of machine guns to include non-mechanical bump stocks. This decision was immediately met with backlash. Constitutionalists argued that the outlaw violated the second amendment. Small government conservatives argued that any sort of bump stock ban should be passed as legislation by congress, not through an unelected agency.
Last weekend, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 13-3 decision that the ATF does not have the authority to ban bump stocks. The Court declared in Cargill v. Garland that the definition of a machine gun established in the National Firearms Act is not applicable to bump stocks.
“A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of ‘machinegun’ set forth in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act.”
Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod’s majority opinion
Michael Cargill, the appellant in the court case, took to Twitter to celebrate this judicial win for second amendment activists:
