Texas man challenges bump stock ban in Supreme Court, says feds went too far

Michael Cargill, owner of Central Texas Gun Works, surrendered his bump stocks after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives banned them in 2018 in the aftermath of a shooting that killed 60 people in Las Vegas.

Bump stocks were used by the gunman in the 2017 massacre. Though they are not firearms themselves, bump stocks allow semiautomatic weapons to fire repeatedly at high speed.

Mr. Cargill subsequently filed a lawsuit arguing that the ATF’s ban violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how agencies create, issue and enforce regulations.

The full 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in his favor, reasoning that the government’s use of a decades-old ban on machine guns and applying that to bump stocks was ambiguous.

The government’s appeal of that ruling goes to the Supreme Court on Wednesday. The justices will decide if bump stocks can be classified as machine guns and be banned under the National Firearms Act of 1934.

Mr. Cargill argues that only Congress, not the ATF, can ban bump stocks. An agency shouldn’t have the authority to make laws and ban various aspects of the firearm industry, he says.

“Once you give them an inch, they will take a mile,” Mr. Cargill said of the feds in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times. “If we win, we use this case law down the road for the Second Amendment community.”

The case isn’t a challenge under the Second Amendment, but Mr. Cargill said a win will help bolster gun rights. The focus of his argument is alleged errors made during the ATF’s rulemaking process.

The Trump administration, through the ATF, prohibited bump stocks after the Las Vegas shooting, in which a gunman used the devices to shoot more than 500 people in 11 minutes.

The ATF’s 2018 rule cited Congress’ law restricting ownership of machine guns manufactured after 1986 under an application of the National Firearms Act. The feds’ position is that bump stocks make nearly any gun a machine gun when attached to a firearm.

Owners had until March 2019 to surrender their bump stocks after they were outlawed.

According to the ATF, more than 500,000 Americans purchased bump stocks during the nearly 10-year period they were lawfully available. The expected loss of property value is expected to exceed $100 million, according to court documents.

The high court had previously declined to review the legality of a bump stock ban at least three times. The U.S. Courts of Appeals for the 6th, 10th and D.C. circuits refused to hear challenges over the ATF’s rule.

For nine years, ATF had concluded that bump stocks are not machine guns because they “they did not ‘automatically’ shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger,” according to court records.

That changed after the 2017 mass shooting.

Adam Winkler, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles said that created “enormous political pressure” on the Trump administration to act. He noted it is not surprising that the Trump and the Biden administrations are defending the ATF rule.

“This is an example of where a Republican president adopted a policy that was very attractive to Democrats,” Mr. Winkler said.

The Justice Department said in its brief that after the 2017 shooting, the ATF added various regulations that included a revision of the classification of bump stocks.

“Bump stocks enable a shooter to engage in a continuous firing sequence that occurs ‘automatically,’” U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the federal government’s filing. “A bump stock thus constitutes a ‘self-regulating’ or ‘self-acting’ mechanism that allows the shooter to attain continuous firing after a single pull of the trigger and, accordingly, is a machinegun.”