Court upholds Trump administration’s ban of gun bump stocks

NEW ORLEANS — A federal appeals court in New Orleans is the latest to uphold a federal ban on “bump stocks” — devices attached to semiautomatic firearms so that a shooter can fire multiple rounds with a single trigger pull. The ban was instituted by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in a rule declaring that bump stocks are classified as “machineguns,” banned by National Firearms Act. According to the ATF, bump stock devices harness the recoil energy of a semiautomatic firearm so that a trigger “resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter.” The National Firearms Act, according to the court records, outlaws weapons that fire continuously with “a single function of the trigger.” Opponents of the ATF rule argue that the trigger itself functions multiple times when a bump stock is used. “As one district court has observed, there is no reason why ‘Congress would have zeroed in on the mechanistic movement of the trigger in seeking to regulate automatic weapons,’ given that the ‘ill sought to be captured by this definition was the ability to drastically increase a weapon’s rate of fire, not the precise mechanism by which that capability is achieved,’” Higginson wrote in an opinion joined by judges James Dennis and Gregg Costa.