Bump-Stock Ban Left Intact as Supreme Court Spurns Gun Advocates

(Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal by gun-rights advocates and left intact a new federal ban on bump stocks, the attachments that can make a semiautomatic rifle fire like a machine gun.

President Donald Trump’s administration banned bump stocks after about a dozen were found in the hotel room of the shooter in the October 2017 Las Vegas concert massacre. Fifty-eight people were killed in the attack, the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history.

The ban, which imposes criminal penalties, requires people to relinquish or destroy the devices. Gun-rights advocates said U.S. residents possessed 500,000 bump stocks, valued at more than $100 million.

Five people and three organizations argued in their appeal that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives improperly reclassified bump stocks as machine guns, which have been heavily regulated in the U.S. since 1934 and virtually banned since 1986.

Although the court as a whole made no comment, Justice Neil Gorsuch criticized the reasoning of the appeals court that backed the ban, and he suggested the Supreme Court might intervene on the subject at a later point.

Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, faulted the lower court for invoking “Chevron deference,” a legal doctrine that has drawn criticism in conservative circles in recent years. Chevron deference requires courts to defer to agencies on the meaning of ambiguous laws if the regulators’ interpretation is reasonable.

Gorsuch said it was too soon for the nation’s highest court to hear an appeal of what he called a “preliminary” ruling on bump stocks. “But waiting should not be mistaken for lack of concern,” he wrote.

The appeal contended that Chevron deference shouldn’t apply to the interpretation of criminal statutes. The Trump administration said it wasn’t relying on Chevron deference, calling its approach the “best interpretation of the statute.”

The National Firearms Act defines a machine gun 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.”

The Supreme Court in 2019 refused to block the ban before it took effect.

The case is Guedes v. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, 19-296.

To contact the reporter on this story: Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Joe Sobczyk at jsobczyk@bloomberg.net, Laurie Asséo, Ros Krasny

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