The last twelve months have brought massive court rulings on critical issues. But there’s more on the way.
Because this federal court’s ruling on the Second Amendment has everyone absolutely stunned.
A federal appeals court has overturned a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a firearm modification that allows a semi-automatic gun to fire at a higher rate of fire.
The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans decided that bump stocks are exempt from the same machine gun prohibitions by a vote of 13 to 3.
When the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) approved a rule defining bump stocks as “machine guns,” the court found that the agency had hurried the legislative process and lacked the power from Congress to do so.
“A plain reading of the statutory language, paired with close consideration of the mechanics of a semi-automatic firearm, reveals that a bump stock is excluded from the technical definition of ‘machinegun’ outlined in the Gun Control Act and National Firearms Act,” a statement from the court read.
After the catastrophic shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, the previous president Trump implemented the bump stock ban.
The 5th Circuit asserted that the prohibition was implemented because feelings were raw following the fatal shooting.
The court decided that a bump stock does not turn semi-automatic firearms into machine guns since it causes the trigger to fire more than once.
Trump issued an executive order in 2018 directing the attorney general to regulate bump stocks, and the ATF complied.
No matter which way you cut it, the executive branch and the ATF had no authority to ban bump stocks simply because they allowed weapons to be fired faster.
There’s no current regulation on how fast a weapon can be fired, necessarily.
The regulations that are on the book are against fully-automatic rifles that allow an individual to fire indefinitely with the single pull of the trigger.
Bump stocks do not work that way.
They allow a semi-automatic weapon to be fired faster than a normal individual would be able to by using the recoil of the weapon to fire subsequent rounds.
There are similar modifications that can be made to weapons that are entirely legal and haven’t been under legal fire because the media hasn’t demonized them yet.
Binary triggers, for example, will fire a round upon the pull of a trigger and upon the release of a trigger.
Though it still operates within the confines of a semi-automatic action.
Bump stocks are the same way.
If individuals in the federal government want to regulate these modifications, they have to go through Congress to do so.
As the 5th Circuit Court points out, they can’t just label these items as “machine guns” because they want to demonize them and ban them.
It’s not the job of the executive branch to legislate.
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
