(The Center Square) – The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a federal ban on bump stocks later in February, the latest opportunity for the high court to rule on gun violence and 2nd Amendment rights.
The case in question, Garland v. Cargill, came after the Trump administration banned bump stocks, attachments added to semiautomatic weapons to make them fire more quickly, classifying them as “machine guns,” which are banned by federal law.
Gun-rights groups filed suit in 2018, and after a lengthy legal battle, the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on the case late next month.
Trump banned the bump stocks in 2018 via a rule from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which is under the Department of Justice umbrella. Trump’s ban came largely as a response to a Las Vegas 2017 mass shooting where nearly 60 were killed by a shooter using a bump stock device.
The rule requires those who own bump stocks to destroy them or hand them over to ATF.
“Specifically, these devices convert an otherwise semiautomatic firearm into a machinegun by functioning as a self-acting or self-regulating mechanism that harnesses the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm in a manner that allows the trigger to reset and continue firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter,” the DOJ rule summary said at the time. “Hence, a semiautomatic firearm to which a bump-stock-type device is attached is able to produce automatic fire with a single pull of the trigger.”
Gun advocates say the federal rule violates the 2nd amendment and is changing terms to broaden the definition of machine gun to include some semiautomatic weapons.
The Firearms Policy Coalition filed an amicus brief in that case this week, arguing the rule violates the Constitution.
“When ATF first considered the legality of bump stocks over twenty years ago, it correctly concluded that they do not qualify as ‘machineguns,’” the brief said. “Yet in 2018, in the face of acute political pressure, the agency reversed course and adopted a new definition of the term that encompasses the bump stocks at issue. Petitioners’ defense of that newfound interpretation either ignores the statute Congress enacted or seeks to rewrite it.”
U.S. Constitution
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
I don’t remember anything in the Constitution that forces law abiding citizens to defend themselves with flintlocks against criminals with Bump Stocks or fully automatic weapons?
My opinion is that ALL gun powers regarding the right to bear arms, allows THE PEOPLE to defend themselves in that same manner which they are attacked, even if it is Joe Biden and his infamous F-16 statement. ANY alteration of these rights that empower a Federal Government more advantage to protect itself from THE PEOPLE, than THE PEOPLE have to protect themselves from the government, obviously negates the purpose and intention our Founders had in creating our 2nd amendment rights, and can only be changed CONSTITUTIONALLY in a proper STATE majority passed U.S. Constitutional amendment that surrenders that power CONSTITUTIONALLY. Only the States themselves can pass laws that empower the lawbreakers over the law abiders and when that socialist lab experiment fails, the failure is designed to teach a lesson to the other states what NOT to do, and we only lose peace and tranquility of a few states temporarily, NOT the peace and tranquility of a whole country permanently while Texas is forced to become California.
NOR do i remember anything in the constitution, about UNELECTED FEDERAL Bureaucracies, being ABOVE the constitution, and being allowed to CRAFT their OWN RULES and laws, they THEN GET TO ENFORCE on we the people..