A Vermont legal scholar and the state’s top prosecutor said a ruling Friday by the U.S. Supreme Court overturning a federal ban on bump stocks won’t result in throwing out a separate state ban in Vermont on the devices that allow semi-automatic rifles to fire more rapidly.
The 6-3 decision by the nation’s highest court struck down the bump stock ban enacted by the Trump administration after the 2017 deadly mass shooting at a country music concert in Las Vegas in which a shooter used firearms with bump stocks, The New York Times reported Friday.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives had overstepped its authority when it prohibited the device and issued a rule that classified bump stocks as machine guns, The Times reported.
“We hold that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,’” Thomas wrote, according to The Times report.
Vermont Law and Graduate School Professor Peter Teachout, who specializes in constitutional law, said Friday that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling striking down the federal bump stock ban will not also overturn a separate state law prohibiting bump stocks in Vermont.
“It was not based on the Constitution’s Second Amendment,” Teachout said of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision. “It was based on the interpretation of a federal statute that was adopted about 100 years ago making it a federal crime under federal law to possess and use machine guns.”
The holding of the high court’s ruling, Teachout said, was that “guns modified with these bump stocks do not constitute machine guns within the meaning of the federal statute.”
As a result, he said, it limits the ability of the federal government to use that federal statute to ban bump stocks.
“Since it’s not based on constitutional grounds,” Teachout said of the high court’s decision, “it has no impact at all on Vermont’s regulation of firearms.”
It would have been a different matter had the U.S. Supreme Court decision struck down the ban based on Second Amendment grounds, according to Teachout, since the U.S Constitution applies to states as well as the federal government.
“I’m not saying it’s not open to challenge,” Teachout said of Vermont’s bump stock ban. “I’m just saying this Supreme Court decision only applies to the enforcement of federal statutes, not the state statutes.”
Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark said in a statement Friday that her office had filed a brief in support of the federal bump stock ban and called the U.S. Supreme Court ruling “unfortunate.”
“I want to reassure Vermonters that this decision does not have an impact on our state’s — or a couple of our neighboring states’ — own ban on bump stocks,” Clark said in the statement. “The decision also does not prevent Congress from implementing a new ban on these devices.”
The law banning bump stocks in Vermont was part of a series of gun reform measures enacted in 2018. It was passed by lawmakers and signed into law by Gov. Phil Scott two months after an alleged school shooting plot was uncovered in Fair Haven.
The Vermont Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs is currently challenging in federal court in Vermont two firearms laws enacted in the state: a 72-hour waiting period for firearms purchases and a ban on high-capacity magazines.
Chris Bradley, the federation’s president, said Friday it was too soon to say if the U.S. Supreme Court ruling would lead his organization to mount a legal challenge to the bump stock ban in Vermont as well.
“It’s premature at this point, and it’s not the federation according to Chris Bradley. It’s the federation according to the board of directors,” he said.
Bradley added that his organization is “midstream in a very expensive case” that is at the trial court level and likely to include extensive appellate litigation.
“We’re going to do one thing at a time,” he said.
As to his reaction to Friday’s ruling, Bradley replied, “I think the Supreme Court got it right, certainly ATF overstepped their bounds, and they’ve been spanked for it.”
Conor Casey, executive director of GunSense Vermont, a gun control advocacy group, said Friday he was disappointed with the U.S. Supreme Court decision.
“It’s a despicable decision,” said Casey, who is also a state representative. “I really believe that to celebrate this decision is to celebrate the countless deaths of Americans going forward here.”
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissenting to the majority opinion, according to the NewYork Times.
“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” Sotomayor wrote. “A bump stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machine gun, I respectfully dissent.”
NBC News reported Friday that even with the federal ban no longer in place, bump stocks would still not become readily available nationwide as 18 states have enacted legislation banning them, citing Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit gun-control group.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Vermont’s bump stock ban stands despite US Supreme Court ruling throwing out federal prohibition.