He United States Supreme Court has decided to eliminate the federal ban, enacted by former president donald trump, of bump stocks, used in a 2017 massacre in Las Vegas, the worst in the history of the country. The six conservative judges of the Supreme Court prevailed over the three progressive ones to determine that it cannot be used an almost hundred-year-old law, designed to prohibit machine gunsto include bump stocks ( bump stocksin English).
The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, considers that this accessory cannot be equated, a stock designed to increase the firing rate of semi-automatic weapons, to a machine gun. “We conclude that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a machine gun because it does not fire more than one shot through a single activation of the trigger,” the magistrate argued.
In the dissenting opinion, Judge Sonia Sotomayor criticized the majority ruling and asserted that “context and purpose” are not taken into account when applying this definition to prohibit these accessories, behind the worst shooting massacre in the history of the country, which occurred in 2017 in Las Vegas.
Dozens injured and killed in Las Vegas shooting
On October 1, 2017, Stephen Paddock used one of these acceleration mechanisms to shoot nine bullets per second from a hotel window against hundreds of concertgoers in Las Vegas, causing 58 dead and generating chaos that caused injured more than 850 people.
After the Las Vegas shooting, the Trump Administration imposed a federal ban against bump stocks and Joe Biden’s White House maintained and supported it after coming to power.
A weapons dealer, with the support of the National Rifle Associationappealed the ban to the Supreme Court, arguing that the federal firearms control agency (ATF) exceeded its authority by applying the definition of a machine gun too broadly.
