US Supreme Court allows controversial firearm attachment

The US Supreme Court has struck down a law banning the possession of a so-called bump stock. With such an attachment you can fire many more shots than normal in a short time with a semi-automatic rifle. The ban on these accessories was introduced in 2019 under President Trump at the insistence of the US Department of Justice.

The reason was the attack in Las Vegas in 2017 in which a man shot dead 58 visitors to a country festival from a hotel room. Hundreds of visitors were injured. The man used firearms on which he had mounted bump stocks. These enabled him to fire more than a thousand bullets into the crowd in 11 minutes.

Own fully automatic weapons

The case was brought by a Texas firearms dealer who argued that lawmakers had improperly expanded a federal law banning the possession of fully automatic weapons to include a ban on bump stocks.

Six of the nine Supreme Court justices agree. The conservative judges are in the majority there.

At the time the ban was introduced, between 300,000 and 500,000 bump stocks were in circulation in the US. The owners had to hand them in, as did the firearms dealer who had two in his possession.