TheU.S. Supreme Court on Friday declared unlawful a federal ban on “bump stock”devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns, rejecting yet another firearms restriction – this time one enacted under Republican former President Donald Trump. The case centered on how the ATF interpreted a federal law called the National Firearms Act, which defined machine guns as weapons that can “automatically” fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.” The 6-3 ruling was authored by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas.
In a dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the ruling would have “deadly consequences,” saying the court’s majority cast aside the will of Congress to embrace an “artificially narrow definition” of a machine gun, allowing gun users and manufacturers to circumvent the law. Read more.
Here’s a look at what else happened at SCOTUS this week:
