The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a new effort to expand gun rights by declining to hear a challenge to a Trump-era ban on so-called bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic rifles to fire more quickly.
The decision not to hear the two related cases, a blow for gun rights activists, leaves the ban in place. The conservative-majority court issued a major ruling in June that expanded gun rights, although the legal issues in the bump stock cases differed.
Bump stocks are accessories for semi-automatic rifles, such as the popular AR-15-style weapons. They use the recoil energy of a trigger pull to enable the user to fire up to hundreds of rounds a minute.
In a rare example of a Republican administration’s taking action on gun control, President Donald Trump’s administration imposed the ban after the mass shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, when Stephen Paddock used bump stocks to open fire on a country music festival, killing 58 people. Paddock died by suicide as he was about to be apprehended.
The ban, implemented by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, went into effect in 2019 after the Supreme Court declined to block it. Since then, the already conservative court has tilted further to the right, with conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, replacing liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in 2020.
