The Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in a
case that could change gun rights across the country.
Both the Biden administration and gun rights activists appealed to
the higher court,
asking the justices to review a 2019 ban on bump
stocks.
Bump stocks make it possible for semi automatic rifles to
fire more rapidly.
They were banned under the Trump administration following the Las
Vegas mass shooting in 2017.
NBC News legal analyst Danny Cevallos is here with us.
Danny, good morning. So this case sort of seems to
come down to what qualifies as a machine gun.
Walk us through the arguments presented by both sides here.
This is not really a case about whether bump stocks
are a good idea.
This is really a classic example of sometimes Congress is
stuck with the words that uses in a statute.
Congress decided to define a machine gun,
which are items that have been illegal for a long
time,
as something for which one pull of the trigger expels
more than one round.
In other words, a semi automatic gun is 1 pull
of the trigger one round.
Anytime you have multiple bullets coming out from one pull
of the trigger,
that is a machine gun.
They did not define it by rate of fire.
They didn't say 650 rounds per minute shall be a
machine gun.
And for that reason, what a bump stock does was
is it basically makes your finger bionic.
That's the best way I can describe it.
Now, all of us have limitations,
human limitations on our finger.
Imagine if you were born with a mutation and you
could pull your finger,
your trigger finger hundreds of times,
600 times in a minute.
Your firearm would not thereby be illegal.
That's the argument with bump stocks.
All they do is allow you to pull a trigger
many times faster than a human normally could.
Over the past few years,
we know gun rights advocates have tried to challenge these
bans on bump stocks.
They haven't been successful, though,
right? They have. At least once in DC,
that DC court has concluded that as as I think
you could that,
hey, well, this regulation never really imagined bump stocks.
The spirit of a machine gun is satisfied by a
bump stock,
if not the literal definition.
But meanwhile, two other circuit courts of appeal have gone
the other way,
saying, listen, Congress defined it as one pole,
one bullet. And that's what's happening technically with a bump
stock,
just at an increased rate of speed.
So the Supreme Court actually agreed to hear two additional
cases on gun rights just last week.
What kind of implications could those cases have?
Kind of make this paint this whole picture for us
with all of these head of the Supreme Court In
one case,
it's really a First Amendment case.
And it's a case where the state of New York,
an agency sent a memo to bank saying,
hey, you guys ought to be or financial institutions,
I should say, saying you ought to be really careful
who you associate with.
And the NRA says, hey,
you know, that's coercion by the state.
It infringes on our First Amendment rights.
But far more interesting to me is a case called
Rahimi.
Maybe more interesting than bump stocks,
because bump stocks are kind of a rarity unless they
result in a national tragedy.
But something that affects everyday ownership is a federal statute
922. I've dealt with it many times.
I've got a case with it right now where it
prohibits certain people from owning firearms.
But ever since the Supreme Court's decision in Bruin just
a couple years ago,
all of those statutes, both federal and state,
are up in the air because we don't know what
exactly States and the federal government can prohibit people from
owning.
We know that they can prohibit some violent felons.
We know they can prohibit some other people.
But can you prohibit someone with a domestic violence order?
Can you prohibit somebody who's a misdemeanor?
Convicted has a misdemeanor conviction,
a nonviolent felony? All of those rules are covered under
federal statutes and state statutes.
And now it's a big question mark.
I literally have this in one of my cases right
now.
It is a big unknown.
Danny Cevallos, thank you so much as always.