A recent Supreme Court decision striking down the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks was a setback for public safety, but only a temporary one — provided Congress still has the courage to do the right thing.
Bump stocks are attachments that allow a semiautomatic rifle to simulate an automatic one. There is no purpose to owning one other than to release a hail of bullets. In 2017, when a man set out to massacre as many people as possible at a concert in Las Vegas, he attached bump stocks to 14 rifles, fired more than 1,000 rounds, killed 60 people and wounded hundreds more.
After the horror of that day, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives issued a rule prohibiting bump stocks under a long-standing law that bans machine guns and related devices. Now the court has concluded that the agency erred in doing so, and that guns equipped with bump stocks — whatever their effects — don’t constitute machine guns under the law. Writing for the court’s three dissenting members, Justice Sonia Sotomayor took a more practical approach: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.”
Yet perhaps the most important words issued by the court belonged to Justice Samuel Alito. Noting that the Las Vegas shooting “demonstrated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machinegun,” he made clear where responsibility lies. “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns,” he wrote. “Congress can amend the law — and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”
And indeed it must. Democrats have vowed to pass a bill explicitly outlawing bump stocks, and some Republicans have signaled their openness to negotiating. That’s only right, since few spoke out in opposition when the ATF banned bump stocks with President Donald Trump’s support.
Unfortunately, time has a way of weakening resolve, and even the Trump campaign is now attempting to distance itself from the measure. The candidate who once mocked Republicans for fearing the gun lobby now seems to be ducking for cover. Further delay only increases the risk that future mass shooters — whether at concerts, churches, schools, supermarkets or anywhere else — will use these devices to terrible effect.
Congress passed bipartisan gun legislation in 2022, and it should now do so again. To forestall further legal wrangling, it should make clear that all other rapid-fire devices, such as cranks and hellfire triggers, are illegal, too. Another court ruling, which upheld a ban on firearm possession by those under domestic-violence restraining orders, showed that common sense can still prevail on this issue. The families of the 60 people murdered in Las Vegas deserve no less.
