Following the Supreme Court's ruling to reverse a Trump-era issued bump-stock ban on semi-automatic weapons, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued the move will have "deadly consequences."
The Supreme Court on Friday ruled that a Trump-era ban on bump stocks that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns is unlawful.
In a ruling issued Friday, the justices, in a 6-3 decision, said that the Trump administration did not follow federal law when they banned bump stocks in response to a massacre at a Las Vegas music festival in 2017 that left 58 people dead and 500 wounded.
The gunman fired off more than 1,000 rounds in about 11 minutes by attaching bump stocks to semi-automatic rifles, an investigation determined.
Sotomayor issued the dissenting opinion, arguing the majority failed to understand that by equipping a weapon with a bump stock essentially turns the firearm into a machine gun by enabling it to fire off several, successive rounds with a "single function of the trigger."
"Today's decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences. The majority's artificially narrow definition hamstrings the Government's efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter," she wrote.
Machine guns have been banned since 1934.
Federal law defines a "machine gun" as a weapon that can shoot "automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger," noted Sotomayor.
"The majority eviscerates Congress's regulation of machine guns and enables gun users and manufacturers to circumvent federal law," she argued, writing their "logic simply does not overcome the overwhelming textual and contextual evidence that 'single function of the trigger' means a single action by the shooter to initiate a firing sequence, including pulling a trigger and pushing forward on a bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle."
Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined in the dissent.
