Since former President Donald Trump moved to ban bump stocks through regulation in 2017 in response to the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, the deadliest in American history, two legal challenges to the prohibition are pending at the Supreme Court, reports USA Today. The court twice declined emergency requests from gun groups to delay implementation of the ban in 2019 and it declined to hear a similar challenge in 2020.
The legal fight over bump stocks, a device that uses the recoil of a semi-automatic firearm to mimic automatic firing, isn’t being fought on Second Amendment grounds. Rather, the groups and individuals challenging the ban say Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives erred when it interpreted a 1986 ban on the sale of machine guns to also include bump stock devices.