The US Supreme Court dealt a blow to efforts for greater gun control by overturning a ban on "sliding stocks" - a device that increases the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles, practically turning them into machine guns, reported France Press, quoted by BTA.
There were immediate calls for Congress to step in and change the law, according to AFP.
The memory of the mass killing in Las Vegas, the bloodiest in modern American history, in which 58 people were killed and more than 500 injured on October 1, 2017, came to mind. Most of the 22 rifles used by the perpetrator of the carnage were fitted with these sliding stocks, allowing him to fire up to nine bullets per second.
The six conservative Supreme Court justices, against the advice of the three progressives, concluded that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, a federal agency, had overstepped its authority under President Donald Trump Trump in 2018 reclassified slide-action semi-automatic weapons into machine guns banned by a 1934 law.
"We hold that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a sliding stock is not a machine gun because it cannot fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger," Justice Clarence Thomas concluded for the Supreme Court majority.