Senate Republicans block Democrats’ efforts to bring back Trump-era stock ban after swift Supreme Court decision

Senate Republicans blocked quick passage of a bill that would have restored the Trump-era ban on bump stocks.

The Supreme Court struck down the ban last week, giving Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer a chance to force Republicans to object to legislation that would have banned the gun attachment used in the deadliest mass shooting in history .

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., asked for unanimous Senate consent to pass the bill, but Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., objected, nullifying the effort.

Schumer could bring the measure back up as a roll call vote, which would force each senator to vote with a yes-or-no vote.

Bump Stocks allow gun owners to turn a semi-automatic weapon into a firearm that can fire hundreds of bullets per minute.

“As a firearms owner, there is no legitimate use for a bump stock – not for self-defense, not in a law enforcement context, not even in military applications…but where they are custom-made is a mass shooting,” Heinrich said. the Senate floor.

Ricketts called it a “show vote” as he objected to quick passage of the bill. He said the bill went too far.

“This bill would literally ban any item that makes shooting a firearm easier and, in some cases, safer.”

“It’s not really about bump stocks, this bill is about banning as many firearm accessories as possible,” he said. “It’s an unconstitutional attack on law-abiding gun owners.”

The federal ban on bump stocks was passed by former President Trump in 2017 when a gunman opened fire at a Las Vegas nightclub, killing 59 people and injuring more than 500 in 11 minutes.

The government used the federal law banning machine guns to support changing federal firearms regulations. Therefore, the Supreme Court’s decision focused on machine guns in its ruling.

People who owned bump stocks had to either surrender them to the ATF or destroy them. Several states also took action to ban bump stocks.

But Congress failed to act. Democratic lawmakers at the time, including the late Senator Dianne Feinstein, warned that without legislative action, the ban on bump stocks could be quickly reversed or litigated in court.

And last week she was proven right: the Supreme Court overturned the ban in a six-three decision. The conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that bump stocks are not machine guns.

In the case of Garland v. Cargill, gun owner Michael Cargill surrendered two bump stocks to the ATF after the ban, but subsequently filed a lawsuit.

A district court ruled that bump stocks are in line with machine guns, but the ruling was reversed by an appeals court.

“We hold that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,'” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion.

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., asked for unanimous Senate consent to pass the bill, but Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., above, objected, causing the effort to fail.

And even if it could, it wouldn’t do so “automatically”. “ATF has therefore exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a rule classifying bump stocks as machine guns,” he continued.

In his opinion, Justice Samuel Alito addressed the deadly Las Vegas shooting in which a man opened fire at a music festival from his suite at the Mandalay Bay hotel.

Alito said the shooting proved Congress needed to take action, but the law as written did not allow the ban.

“The horrific shooting in Las Vegas in 2017 did not change the legal text or its meaning. That event demonstrated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun, and thus strengthened the case for amending §5845(b),” he wrote.

‘But an event that highlights the need to change a law does not in itself change the meaning of the law. There is a simple solution to the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machine guns,” he continued.

Personal belongings and debris are strewn across the Route 91 Harvest festival grounds across the street from the Mandalay Bay resort and casino in Las Vegas, on October 3, 2017, after the mass shooting

Police rush to the scene of the shooting on October 1, 2017

In her dissent, Judge Sonia Sotomayor wrote about the horrors of the shooting and how all the shooter using bump stocks attached to semiautomatic rifles had to do was “squeeze the trigger and push the gun forward.” The bump stock did the rest.’

She also wrote: ‘When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A semi-automatic bump stock rifle “fires more than one shot automatically, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

“Today the Court is putting the shares back into the hands of citizens,” Sotomayor wrote. “To do so, it overrides Congress’ definition of ‘machine gun’ and resorts to a definition that is inconsistent with the plain meaning of the bill and unsupported by context or purpose.”

Sotomayor warned that the Supreme Court’s decision “will have deadly consequences.”