Survivors of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas and families who received somber calls hours later said they were alarmed when the US Supreme Court on Friday struck down a ban on the gun attachment used by the man who fire more than 1,000 bullets in 11 minutes.
Instituted during the administration of former US president Donald Trump, the ban on bump stocks, a rapid-fire accessory that allows a rate of fire comparable to that of machine guns, was nixed in a 6-3 majority opinion.
US Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the opinion, wrote that the US Department of Justice was wrong in declaring that bump stocks transformed semiautomatic rifles into illegal machines guns because they do not “alter the basic mechanics of firing.”
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The ruling was not directly about the Second Amendment of the US constitution. US Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito concurred with Thomas, but wrote a short separate opinion to stress that the US Congress can change the law.
“I’m pro-gun, but I don’t believe anyone should have an automatic weapon in a civilized world. It’s a bomb waiting to go off,” said Craig Link, whose brother, Victor Link, was struck in the head as the first barrage of shots rang out in Las Vegas on Oct. 1, 2017.
Victor Link, 55, died soon after.
The shooter fired into an outdoor country music festival on the Las Vegas Strip, killing 58 people and wounding more than 850 among the crowd of 22,000.
Shawna Bartlett, 49, was in the front row when rounds began hailing down and her friend was struck in the back. Amid ricocheting bullets and the screams, Bartlett helped load her friend into an ambulance, and she survived.
“I’m not telling you that you can’t get a gun,” but “why does anyone need a bump stock? Why does it need to be legal? People don’t use them for hunting, or in law enforcement,” Bartlett said.
“These guns that are able to shoot way more because these bump stocks give you the power to do that. Nobody needs this stuff. It is absolutely ridiculous,” she said.
Danette Meyers, who become a spokeswoman for her good friends, the family of Christiana Duarte, who was slain at the concert, said she worries that even if Congress does act, it will take time.
“It’s certainly going to give someone out there the opportunity to buy one of these things and just create another mass slaughter,” Meyers said.
She said she thought the Supreme Court’s “liberal dissent got it correct, when they said: ‘You know, it’s common sense that anything capable of initiating rapid fire would be a machine gun.’”
“He shot over a thousand times in about 11 minutes,” she said.
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