Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Arkansas, said Sunday that a Trump-era bill banning bump stocks “is on the verge of violating the Second Amendment” after the Supreme Court overturned the bump stock ban on Friday.
“On the legislative issue, I would suggest that we crack down on violent crime and gun crime before we infringe on the rights of law-abiding Americans,” Cotton said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
When asked if he thought banning bump stocks violated the Second Amendment, Cotton said, “I do.”
“This is close to the limit,” he added. “Legislation language should be looked at, but more than anything, what we need to deter crime in this country is to get tough on crime.”
Cotton highlighted the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday that struck down a ban on bump stocks — which turn semi-automatic rifles into guns that can fire hundreds of rounds per minute — as an example of the court not taking a results-based approach. The ban was passed under former President Trump. The 6-3 decision was made along ideological lines.
“What we saw on Friday was the exact opposite of that: six Republican-appointed justices overturning the Trump administration’s regulation. This is the exact opposite of a results-based judgement. They focused, as they should, on the language and meaning of the statute and the Constitution,” Cotton said.
The Biden administration defended the ban in the Supreme Court after it was first put into place by the Trump administration in response to the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history, in which the shooter used a bump-stocked gun that killed 60 people and injured hundreds more.
The Trump and Biden administrations then had the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) newly classify the device as a machine gun under long-standing federal law, making possession of the device a criminal offense, without violating the Second Amendment.
