The regulatory gun regulation that forbade bump stocks under former President Donald Trump was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit in a ruling rendered on Friday with a vote of 13-3.
According to Reuters, the court implied that Congress, not the executive branch, should be in charge of making decisions about firearms.
The Fifth Circuit’s majority judgment was written by Jennifer Walker Elrod, Circuit Judge, who also stated that the bump stock ban’s authors failed to give “advanced notice that having possession of non-mechanical weapons would be a crime.”
The ATF approved the text of its bump stock prohibition and allowed citizens 90 days to turn the weapon accessories up, according to a December 18, 2018, Breitbart News article.
At the time, Breitbart News had a printout of the DOJ’s executive summary of the prohibition, which read as follows:
“The Nat’l Firearms Act of 1934 as well as the Gun Control Act of 1968 define “machineguns” as those that allow a shooter of a semiautomatic weapon to start a continuous firing loop with a single pulsation. The DOJ is amending the rules of the Bureau of Tobacco, Alcohol, Explosives, and Firearms, to make clear that bump-stock-kind of devices, which include “bump fire” stocks, and slide-fire devices, and also devices with some similar characteristics.”
The summary claims that a bump stock enables a semiautomatic handgun’s trigger to reset between each round of firing, but it refers to the bump stock-attatched “semiautomatic firearm” as a “machinegun” because it is “self-acting or it is self-regulating.”
The Fifth Circuit stated on Jan. 6, 2022, that the existence of a bump stock does not cause a handgun to fulfill the meaning of a machine gun because the trigger can still be pulled and reset while a bump stock is attached to a semiautomatic weapon, according to WGRZ.
“The technical meaning of “machinegun” as stated in the Gun Control Act as well as the National Firearms Act excludes bump stocks,” according to Judge Elrod’s observation: “A straightforward reading of all the statutory wording, along with a close study of the mechanism of a semi-automatic handgun.”
