“Like other machineguns, rifles modified with bump stocks are exceedingly dangerous; Congress prohibited the possession of such weapons for good reason.” US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar wrote in the new filing, according to CNN.
Should be denied cert. just on the basis of a material misstatement.
Bump stocks do NOT a machine gun make.
They enable the firing of a semi automatic firearm at closer to its theoretical rate of fire, but do not materially alter the fact that it still takes one pull of the trigger for each round fired. It just makes it easier to pull the trigger in synch with the cycling of the firearm.
With a machine gun, either the gun fires a predetermined number of rounds (as in 3-round burst on a select fire weapon) per pull of the trigger or continues to fire as the trigger is held down until ammunition is exhausted or the trigger is released. One pull of the trigger is capable of firing multiple rounds.
A semi-automatic rifle with a bump stock does not function that way, and is, by definition, NOT a machine gun.