"Bump stocks, we are writing that out. I am writing that out. It’s gone, don’t worry about it. It’s gone, essentially gone, because we are going to make it so tough, you’re not going to be able to get them. Nobody’s going to want them anyway.”
- Donald Trump, February 26th, 2018.
On December 18th, 2018, Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker announced that the Department of Justice amended the regulations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, clarifying that bump stocks fall within the definition of “machinegun” under federal law, as such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger. The ruling went into effect March 26th of 2019. They changed the definition of “machinegun” in the Gun Control Act (GCA) and National Firearms Act (NFA) to include bump stocks, through mandate without the approval of Congress. The BATFE's justification reads as follows, "bump stock type devices, i.e., devices that allow a semiautomatic firearm to shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm to which it is affixed so that the trigger resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter." WRONG. The trigger is "pulled" again and again consecutively at a dramatically accelerated rate. There are many variations of bump stocks or bump firing, ingenious ways of which to utilize recoil and momentum resulting in multiple trigger "pulls" very quickly.
In 1984, the Supreme Court decided Chevron v. National Resources Defense Council, which created the doctrine that courts must defer to the government agencies when a law is ambiguous. The BATFE and the Executive Branch revel in the ambiguity of legalese. The Firearms Policy Coalition, the Gun Owners of America and other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against the BATFE ruling. A federal court refused to issue an injunction against the ban, saying the plaintiffs would likely lose the case. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld that decision, deferring to the bureau's new interpretation of the National Firearms Act.
Conservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, issued a statement agreeing with the decision to deny the appeal, very likely based on the Chevron Doctrine. But he criticized the lower court's deference to a federal agency, that had changed its interpretation of a longstanding law.
"How, in all this, can ordinary citizens be expected to keep up?" Gorsuch asked, adding that the bump stock dispute may return to the Supreme Court at a later date.
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