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Fifth Circuit upholds federal ban on bump stocks

The appeals court found that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives correctly classified bump stocks as machine guns and outlawed their ownership.

(CN) — A united Fifth Circuit panel has upheld a Trump-era rule banning the ownership of bump stocks – which enable semiautomatic weapons to fire continuously – under a decades-old federal law prohibiting machine guns.

A three-judge panel of the federal appeals court rejected a challenge from a Texas-based bump stock owner, who argued that the rule “contradicts the plain language of the statute” because bump stocks do not shoot “more than one shot…by a single function of the trigger.”

“ATF’s interpretation of the statute is the best interpretation,” wrote U.S. Circuit Judge Stephen A. Higginson, a Barack Obama appointee. “The phrase ‘single function of the trigger,’ as used in the National Firearms Act, means ‘a single pull of the trigger and analogous motions.'"

Tuesday's opinion went on to say that applying a mechanistic interpretation to the federal law “defies common sense.”

Bump stocks were developed in the early 2000s but only came under fire in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting in which 58 people were killed and hundreds more injured after gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire from his hotel room with rifles equipped with bump stocks.

In an order last year, U.S. District Judge David Ezra of the Western District of Texas found that pushing on a trigger “is automatic fire.”

“We find that incorrect,” Caleb Kruckenberg, an attorney with the New Civil Liberties Alliance representing the gun owner, told the Fifth Circuit panel at oral arguments in October about the federal judge’s finding.

The New Civil Liberties Alliance argued that “the case is not about gun control. Rather, it brings to the fore the question of who gets to make the laws that restrict the American people’s liberty.” Kruckenberg also argued that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, lacked authority to outlaw bump stocks.

But the New Orleans-based appeals court shot down Kruckenberg’s reading of the statute, concluding that semiautomatic firearms equipped with bump stocks shoot “automatically for purposes of the statute.”

“A bump stock is ‘a part designed and intended’ to enable a person armed with a semiautomatic rifle to ‘shoot[] . . . automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger,’” Higginson wrote. “Accordingly, we agree with the district court that the bump stock rule properly classifies bump stocks as ‘machinegun[s]’ for purposes of federal law.”

The court also ruled that the gun owner lacked standing to challenge in federal court the ATF’s authority to issue the bump stock rule, which went into effect in 2019.

U.S. Circuit Judges James Dennis, a Bill Clinton appointee, and Gregg Costa, another appointee of Obama, joined Higginson on the panel. 

The congressional order at issue outlawing machine guns was written in 1934 and revised in 1968 under the auspices of gun control and regulation.

The Fifth Circuit ruling comes less than two weeks after the en banc Sixth Circuit split 8-8 in a similar challenge to the classification of bump stocks as machine guns. The Cincinnati-based appeals court's divided ruling reinstated a lower court decision to allow the federal government to outlaw the rapid-fire devices.

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Categories / Appeals, Civil Rights, Government, National

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