Minnesota joins coalition urging Supreme Court to uphold ban on bump stock devices

Minnesota on Wednesday joined a group of about two dozen states urging the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a federal ban on devices that allow semi-automatic firearms to fire rapidly.

Attorney General Keith Ellison and 22 other state attorneys general are calling for the reversal of a January 2023 appellate court decision that would undo a ban on bump stocks. The lower court struck down a 2018 rule that included the devices under the federal law that criminalized unlicensed machine gun ownership.

Bump stocks allow users to fire multiple rounds in seconds with a single trigger pull. The federal rule in question was issued by the Donald Trump administration's Justice Department after a Las Vegas shooter used firearms fitted with bump stocks to kill 58 people and injure hundreds more at a music festival. The shooter was able to fire more than 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes into a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers.

"The facts are clear: Bump stocks are a threat to the safety of all Minnesotans and Americans everywhere, and the rule that bans them is simply common sense," Ellison said. "I'm asking the Supreme Court to uphold the rule because the last thing Minnesotans want is to make it easier for dangerous people to get their hands on even more lethal firearms."

The Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that the federal law on machine guns did not clearly cover bump stocks. The Joe Biden administration appealed the ruling.

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in the case early next year. A decision is expected by early summer.

Ellison and a coalition of Democratic attorneys general made their arguments in support of the Biden administration's appeal through an amicus brief filed this week. They are arguing that overturning the rule would endanger the public and law enforcement and added that at least 18 states have already banned or regulated bump stocks, including Minnesota.

Michael Cargill, the plaintiff who challenged the rule in the case now before the Supreme Court, argued that bump stock devices were useful for people with "limited finger dexterity" and pointed out that in the decade before the 2018 rule change, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) repeatedly clarified that nonmechanical bump stocks were not machine guns under federal law.

Bump stocks harness the recoil energy of a semi-automatic firearm so that a trigger "resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter," according to the ATF. A shooter must maintain constant forward pressure on the weapon with the nonshooting hand and constant pressure on the trigger with the trigger finger.

According to court records, the ATF estimated that Americans bought 520,000 bump stocks during the nine years they were excluded from being legally considered a machine gun. The 2018 rule required bump stock owners to destroy those devices or turn them over to law enforcement.

This story contains material from the Associated Press.