CINCINNATI (CN) — A divided appeals court panel
ruled Thursday that several gun rights groups should have been granted an injunction against the enforcement of an ATF rule that defines bump stocks as machine guns and makes it a felony offense to possess one.
The rule, adopted in the aftermath of the
2017 shooting of concertgoers in Las Vegas, criminalized possession of the rapid-fire gun attachments used to increase the rate of fire of semiautomatic weapons.
A federal judge
denied Gun Owners of America’s motion for a preliminary injunction in March 2019, and determined the the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ rule was entitled to
Chevron deference.
Established after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the 1984 case
Chevron USA Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council Inc., the doctrine holds that a court may not substitute its own opinion in the place of a reasonable interpretation made by an administrative agency.
The case was
argued before the Sixth Circuit in December 2019, and Thursday’s decision comes on the heels of several mass shootings in the United States. Most recently, police say a suspect in Colorado
killed 10 people inside a supermarket with an AR-15 style pistol.
Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Alice Batchelder, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, wrote the panel’s majority opinion and began with analysis of the lower court’s application of
Chevron deference.
She cited the 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision in
United States v. Apel, in which the nation’s high court ruled that “we have
never held that the government’s reading of a
criminal statute is entitled to
any deference.” (Emphasis in original.)
