Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has joined 22 other states' attorneys general in calling for the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold a federal ban on bump stocks.
Those are devices that allow semi-automatic guns to fire multiple rounds in just one pull of the trigger.
A recent appellate court ruling would undo the ban. Federal appeals courts have come to different decisions about whether the regulation defining a bump stock as a machine gun comports with federal law.
Such a gun was used in the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival that killed 58 people and injured hundreds of others.
In a statement, Ellison says 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,” said Attorney General Ellison. “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 ban on bump stocks took effect in 2019. In the Las Vegas shooting, the gunman, a 64-year-old retired postal service worker and high-stakes gambler, used assault-style rifles to fire more than 1,000 rounds in 11 minutes into a crowd of 22,000 music fans.
Most of the rifles were fitted with bump stock devices and high-capacity magazines. A total of 58 people were killed in the shooting, and two died later. Hundreds were injured.
The Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks was an about-face for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. In 2010, under the Obama administration, the agency found that a bump stock should not be classified as a machine gun and therefore should not be banned under federal law.
Following the Las Vegas shooting, officials revisited that determination and found it incorrect.
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 non-shooting hand and constant pressure on the trigger with the trigger finger, according to court records.
The full U.S. 5th Circuit ruled 13-3 in January that Congress would have to change federal law to ban bump stocks.
“The definition of ‘machinegun’ as set forth in the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act does not apply to bump stocks,” Judge Jennifer Walker Elrod wrote for the 5th Circuit.
But a panel of three judges on the federal appeals court in Washington looked at the same language and came to a different conclusion.
Judge Robert Wilkins wrote for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that “under the best interpretation of the statute, a bump stock is a self-regulating mechanism that allows a shooter to shoot more than one shot through a single pull of the trigger. As such, it is a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and Gun Control Act.”
Joining Attorney General Ellison in the brief are District of Columbia Attorney General Brian L. Schwalb, who led the coalition, and the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington.