The Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the government overstepped its authority when it banned bump stocks, a gun accessory that transforms a semiautomatic rifle into a firearm that functions similarly to a machine gun.
The high court ruled 6 to 3 along ideological lines in favor of Michael Cargill, a gun store owner who challenged the ban. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the majority opinion.
“A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,” Thomas wrote. “With or without a bump stock, a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot.”
The Trump administration, which issued the ban, deemed bump stocks machine guns in 2017. The move came in response to the Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest shooting in U.S. history, which killed 58 people. The suspect used bump stocks when he fired into a crowd of thousands who were attending a concert.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor read the court’s dissenting opinion from the bench.
“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,” Sotomayor wrote.
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She observed that a bump stock on a semiautomatic rifle requires pulling a trigger once to fire multiple shots.
“Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent,” she wrote.
