The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday turned away another challenge to a federal ban imposed under former President Donald Trump on devices called “bump stocks” that enable a semi-automatic weapon to fire like a machine gun.
The justices declined to review an appeal by a group of firearms dealers and individuals in Minnesota, Texas, and Kentucky after a lower court rejected their arguments that the government had violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment “takings clause” by effectively taking their private property without just compensation.
Trump’s administration moved to reclassify bump stocks as machine guns, which are forbidden under U.S. law, in a rare firearms control measure prompted by a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas.
The Supreme Court in 2019 declined to block the ban from going into effect. The justices last month rejected appeals by a Utah gun lobbyist and firearms rights groups of lower court rulings upholding the ban as a reasonable interpretation of a federal law prohibiting machine gun possession.
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