The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit yesterday upheld the federal bump stock ban that took effect in 2019, approving the legal contortions required to justify it. In blessing the Trump administration's redefinition of machine guns to include bump stocks and firearms equipped with them, the appeals court did not merely defer to regulators' interpretation of an ambiguous statute. It concluded that the new reading of the law—which contradicts the position that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) consistently took before then-President Donald Trump demanded that the agency ban bump stocks by administrative fiat—is "the best interpretation of the statute."
That is hard to believe. The ATF's justification for the ban is so implausible that it seems clear the agency rewrote the law to accommodate the president's policy preferences, criminalizing previously legal conduct without bothering to seek new legislation from Congress.
