US Supreme Court takes on bump stocks ban

The US Supreme Court will soon decide whether to lift a ban on bump stocks, the gun attachments that let rifles fire hundreds of bullets per minute.

The Trump administration banned the stocks by classifying them as machine guns after they were used in the deadliest mass shooting in US history.

Under the 1986 National Firearms Act, owning a machine gun is illegal.

The court will hear arguments on Wednesday in the case and is expected to issue a decision in June.

In Garland v Cargill, a Texas resident has challenged the bump stock ban, saying that the government interpreted what qualifies as a machine gun too broadly.

In 2017, a gunman opened fire at a concert in Las Vegas, killing 60 people and injuring hundreds in the deadliest shooting the country has ever experienced.

Officials determined that he had attached then-legal - but controversial - bump stocks onto 12 of his semi-automatic rifles to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, the same rate as many machine guns.

Political pressure grew to outlaw the relatively new devices, which could be obtained without the extensive background checks required for purchasing automatic weapons.

It is illegal to modify the internal components of semi-automatic rifles - which typically manage about 60 aimed shots per minute - to make them fully automatic, but gun owners can legally buy accessories to increase the rate of fire.

The bump stock harnesses a rifle's recoil to rapidly fire multiple rounds. It replaces the weapon's stock, which is held against the shoulder, and allows the gun to slide back and forward between a shooter's shoulder and trigger finger. That motion - or "bump"- lets the gun fire without the shooter having to move their trigger finger.

Shortly after the Las Vegas shooting, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) under President Donald Trump expanded the definition of machine gun to prohibit the production, sale, and possession of bump stocks.

In the 1986 firearms act, machine guns are defined as any "weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger".

After the ban was imposed, Texan Michael Cargill challenged the ATF's rule.

A federal appeals court reversed an earlier decision that "bump stocks qualify as machine guns under the best interpretation", saying it was too broad.

Now the conservative-majority Supreme Court will have the final word.

If it sides with the Texas Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, it would invalidate the ATF's rule and any states that do not have their own laws in place restricting bump stocks would automatically see bump stocks legalised again.