The Supreme Court’s ruling in Cargill has been heralded as a win for the Second Amendment by many, including myself. Yet that’s not really accurate. The Second Amendment wasn’t up for discussion. What was on the table was whether a federal agency could not just reinterpret the law but essentially rewrite it on their own whim, because that’s essentially what the ATF did with the bump stock ban.

The Court overturned it, and while anti-gunners are still outraged about it, it was the right decision. The death of the Chevron Doctrine only reinforces that.

Yet there may be some confusion in some circles about what impact this has on bump stock bans at the state level.

In short, there isn’t any.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives exceeded its authority in 2019 when it classified bump stocks as machine guns.

But prohibitions will remain intact in states like Illinois that have banned bump stocks through legislative action. 

…

The Supreme Court reasoned the ATF exceeded its authority because, since the gun moves against the trigger, it is not an automatic function and therefore not a machine gun. 

“With or without a bump stock, a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot. And, any subsequent shot fired after the trigger has been released and reset is the result of a separate and distinct ‘function of the trigger.’ All that a bump stock does is accelerate the rate of fire by causing these distinct ‘function[s]’of the trigger to occur in rapid succession,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion.

Yet in states like Illinois, they didn’t rely on an agency to rewrite the rules. They simply banned the devices.

While we can argue that it, too, is unconstitutional, the truth is that Cargill wasn’t about legislated bump stock bans. The decision simply said the ATF couldn’t ban them unilaterally.

Well, not “simply.” It also said that going through the legislature was the correct way to address this.

Now, the decision specified Congress, which was likely because the rule the ATF created involved a “reinterpretation” of the National Firearms Act that essentially reinvented the definition of a machine gun from that law, but there’s plenty of reason many would figure that would apply to any legislative body creating laws for their given area of responsibility.

In time, I suspect we’ll see bump stock bans challenged in court and I think a lot of people will be surprised to see Cargill get either no mention or else a discussion of why Cargill has no bearing on the case before the court at that time.

For now, though, states with their own bump stock bans have nothing to worry about. Cargill has no impact on them and likely never will. That ruling really had nothing to do with the Second Amendment generally or bump stocks more specifically.

No, that’s to come at a later date, when I hope we’ll see these bans overruled for good.

The people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. That doesn’t include an exception for people being really uncomfortable with an accessory because someone did something awful with it.