YORK, Pa. — More than five years after the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives banned the use of bump stocks on firearms, the nation's highest court struck down the rule for an overreach of power.
The ban on gun accessories was implemented as a response to a 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival that killed 60 people. The gunman used bump stocks to fire more than a thousand rounds of ammunition in 11 minutes.
Lee Snyder with Winter Firearms LLC in Red Lion said that the accessory provides mechanical assistance to firing a rifle by using the energy from the gun's recoil.
“The big thing is now the motion of the gun is going to reset the trigger each time, because it will leave your finger and come back to it, as opposed to you moving your finger," said Snyder. "But it’s still one shot for each pull.”
After the shooting, President Donald Trump urged the ATF to issue a ban on the accessories. A Texas gun shop owner would challenge that ban, arguing the ATF wrongly classified bump stocks as illegal machine guns.
Snyder said Winter Firearms has never sold bump stocks, due to the legal grey area it sat in.
“The biggest fear, not fear so much, is that if [the owner] has a bunch of that in stock and it does go the other way, then he has to destroy them and he loses money doing that," said Snyder.
The majority 6-3 opinion stated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun, because the gun does not shoot more than one round automatically with the single pull of the trigger.
Josh Fleitman with Ceasefire PA said that the ruling will allow the accessory to appear in Commonwealth gun stores once again.
“Pennsylvania is one of at least 33 states that does not have a state-level ban on bump stocks," said Fleitman. "So now, here in Pennsylvania bump stocks are, for all intent and purposes, totally legal.”
Fleitman said the gun violence advocacy nonprofit will call on the Pennsylvania State General Assembly to immediately take action after Friday's ruling.
Last month, the State House narrowly failed to pass a bill that would have banned bump stocks in Pennsylvania by one vote.
The court's liberal justices argued it was "common sense" that anything capable of firing "a torrent of bullets" was a machine gun under federal law.