STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
A Supreme Court ruling today sent me back into memory and into the NPR archives. In 2017, we listened to the sounds of a gunman firing into a music festival from high in a Las Vegas hotel. We said at the time that it sounded like an automatic weapon - turned out to be a weapon modified to fire as if automatic using a bump stock. President Trump's administration soon banned them, and now the high court has said that that ban exceeded federal authority under the law. NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg is in our studios. Nina, good morning.
NINA TOTENBERG, BYLINE: Good morning, Steve.
INSKEEP: What was the court majority's thinking here?
TOTENBERG: Well, the question before the court was whether a so-called bump stock device converts a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun that fires automatically. The Trump administration enacted this ban on bump stocks after the Las Vegas massacre, as you said, and the Biden administration defended the ban in court, arguing that with the addition of a bump stock, a semi-automatic weapon can fire up to 800 rounds per minute.
INSKEEP: Wow.
TOTENBERG: Thus transforming a legal semi-automatic weapon into an illegal machine gun. But today, voting along ideological lines, the Supreme Court's conservative supermajority rejected that argument. Writing for the court, Justice Clarence Thomas said that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a machine gun because the gun's internal mechanism does not fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger, and that therefore the ATF exceeded its statutory authority by classifying bump stocks as machine guns. And I got to say that in a concurring opinion, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the horrible shooting in Las Vegas does not change the clear text of the 1986 statute. He said that that event demonstrated that a semi-automatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun, and that the simple remedy for that is for Congress to actually pass a new law that makes that clear.
INSKEEP: OK, saying that it's up to Congress. You noted an ideological divide on the court. We should observe that sometimes they don't vote exactly along ideological lines - this time they do. Clarence Thomas writes the majority, as he has in some other gun rulings. Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench, read it aloud. What did she say?
TOTENBERG: It's very unusual for a justice to do this. They do it maybe two, three, four times a year. That's it. She accused the majority of ignoring the reality of gun violence and the purpose of the 1986 statute. Today, the court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress' definition of machine gun, she said, and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text. When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck, she said, I call that bird a duck. The majority, she said, artificially has a narrow - artificially narrow definition that hamstrings the government's efforts to keep machine guns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.
INSKEEP: Calling the decision myopic, if I'm not mistaken.
TOTENBERG: Correct.
INSKEEP: Nina, thanks so much.
TOTENBERG: Thank you.
INSKEEP: That's NPR legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg on this day that the United States Supreme Court has overturned a federal ban on bump stocks. Many, many Supreme Court rulings, big rulings, are still expected in this season. And we'll keep you posted right here on NPR News.
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