The Supreme Court sounded skeptical Wednesday of arguments that a law meant to ban machine guns does not cover “bump stocks” that help a shooter mimic an automatic firearm.
The attorney for Michael Cargill, the man at the center of the challenge to a Trump-era rule from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, told the justices the agency went too far when it decided bump stocks fit the definition of a machine gun, which are generally banned under federal law.
A bump stock is an add-on to a gun that uses recoil to “bump” the gun back into the trigger finger of the shooter, firing faster than usual, and became an issue after authorities said a shooter had several of them on guns when he killed more than 50 people at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017.
