New Orleans: A federal appeals court in New Orleans is the latest to uphold a federal ban on bump stock devices attached to semi-automatic firearms so that a shooter can fire multiple rounds with one trigger pull.
The ban was imposed in 2019 by the Trump administration after a sniper in Las Vegas used the device to help orchestrate dozens of concerts in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history in 2017. The US Supreme Court could decide next year whether to hear arguments on the ban.
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in a ruling on Tuesday upheld the decision of Texas-based federal judges in a lawsuit challenging the ban.
A recent challenge at the Sixth Circuit in Cincinnati failed when judges split the issue 8-8. Another challenge is to appeal to the Supreme Court, arising from a failed attempt to lift the ban on the 10th Circuit in Denver.
The ban was established by the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in a rule declaring that bump stock classified as a machine gun is prohibited by the National Firearms Act.
According to the ATF, bump stock devices use the recoil energy of a semiautomatic firearm to reset a trigger and continue firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter. The National Firearms Act, according to court records, outlaws weapons that fire continuously with a single function of the trigger.
Opponents of the ATF rule argue that the trigger itself acts multiple times when a bump stock is used. Judge Stephen Higginson, writing for the three 5th Circuit judges who ruled Tuesday, disagreed, citing a lower court ruling in the 10th Circuit case.
“As observed by a district court, there is no reason why Congress would have zeroed in on the mechanistic movement of the trigger in seeking to regulate automatic weapons, noting that ‘in the capacity sought to be captured by this definition’ There was an ability to drastically increase a weapon’s rate of fire, not the precise mechanism by which that capability is achieved,'” Higginson wrote in an opinion included by judges James Dennis and Greg Costa.
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