US appeals court lifts ban on rapid-fire 'bump stocks' used in worst mass shootings

A US federal appeals court in New Orleans has ruled against a 2019 ban on "Bump-Stock-Type Devices," a rapid-fire gun attachment that was used in the deadliest mass shootings in modern US history.

The ban on "bump stocks" was instituted after a sniper perched in a high-rise hotel using bump stock-equipped weapons massacred dozens of people in Las Vegas in 2017. Gun rights advocates file lawsuits against the ban in multiple courts.

The ban was struck down on Friday by the 16-member 5th US Circuit Court of the appeals court in New Orleans.

The court found that the definition of illegal machinegun “does not apply 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 wrote in the lead majority opinion.

However, the court's latest ruling does not have an immediate effect on the ban and the case will now be referred back to the lower court to decide on how to proceed with the lawsuit. Eventually, the case will likely be decided by the judges at the US Supreme Court.

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The gun rights advocates opposed to the ban argue that bump stocks do not fall under the definition of machine guns which are banned by federal law. The US Justice Department's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) powered by its legal experts, however, says bump stocks do fit in under the ban on illegal machineguns.

Bump stocks harness the recoil energy of a semiautomatic firearm so that a trigger “resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter,” according to the ATF. A shooter must maintain constant forward pressure on the weapon with the non-shooting hand, and constant pressure on the trigger with the trigger finger, according to court records.

US Department of Justice lawyer Mark Stern said the key is the action of the shooter.

“You only have to do one thing,” Stern told the judges. “Your trigger finger isn’t doing anything other than sitting still.”

Opponents of the ATF rule argue that the trigger itself functions multiple times when a bump stock is used, so, therefore, bump stock weapons do not qualify as machine guns under federal law. They point to language in the law that defines a machine gun as one that fires multiple times with a “single function of the trigger.”

Most of the judges who ruled against the ban also agreed that if the law is ambiguous about the definition of machinegun, it is up to Congress to address and clarify the issue.

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