The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared prepared to uphold a Trump-era regulation that would ban bump stocks that function like machine guns and allow a shooter to spray hundreds of bullets per minute.

The justices, both conservative and liberal, said Congress intended to ban rapid-fire rifles because they were particularly dangerous. And that includes devices that convert a legal semiautomatic weapon into one that “produces a barrage of bullets with the pull of a trigger,” Judge Elena Kagan said.

Judge Neil M. Gorsuch said it would have been better if Congress had revised the law after the mass shooting in Las Vegas

2017,1917,

but he and other conservatives did not indicate they would vote to a

new

regulations after this tragedy was passed.

“It would have been irresponsible of AFT not to take action” after the deadliest mass shooting in the country’s history, Assistant Attorney General Brian Fletcher told the court.

On Oct. On August 1, 2017, a gunman on the top floor of a Las Vegas hotel fired more than 1,000 shots in 11 minutes, wounding more than 500 concertgoers and killing 58.

It was the worst mass shooting in the country’s history.

The shooter used AR-15 semi-automatic rifles equipped with bump stocks that allowed for rapid, continuous firing.

Shortly thereafter, President Trump ordered the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (AFT) to revise its rule and ban bump stocks as illegal machine guns.

It’s the rare example of gun regulation supported by both prominent Republicans and Democrats, but now it faces a court whose conservative justices are often skeptical of agencies that issue new regulations and reinterpret old laws.

Although they asked skeptical questions, none of them

the judges sounded

ready to scrap the bump stock rule.

Judge Sonia Sotomayor questioned the need for such devices. “Why would anyone choose to fire 400 to 800 rounds per minute?” she asked.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said the bump stock allows an AR-15 to operate like a machine gun. “These weapons are what Congress wanted to ban,” she said.

Since 1934, Congress has restricted machine guns, which were defined as “any weapon that … fires more than one shot automatically, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”

Before 2017, ATF said bump stock devices were not machine guns because the shooter had to press forward on the barrel while the recoil collided or triggered a new shot.

But after Trump’s order, ATF changed its position.

Under the new rule, bump stocks were illegal machine guns because they function as “a self-acting or self-regulating mechanism that allows multiple rounds to be fired from a single function of the trigger.”

A bump stock is a plastic or metal piece that fits over the barrel. ATF says it rests against a shooter’s shoulder and “allows a semi-automatic firearm to fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger, utilizing recoil energy…resetting the trigger and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger.” the trigger by the shooter.”

By 2018, when ATF regulations went into effect, approximately 520,000 bump stock devices were in the hands of gun owners and dealers. The agency said they should be destroyed or surrendered.

Gun owners have filed a lawsuit to challenge the new regulations. They lost in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver, Cincinnati and Washington, D.C., but won in the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans.

Michael Cargill, a gun store owner in Austin, Texas, had filed a lawsuit, arguing that the government should not be allowed to change its rules and take away legally purchased guns. He won a 13-3 decision in the 5th Circuit, whose judges said bump stocks do not operate “automatically” like a machine gun because the shooter must “maintain manual, forward pressure on the barrel” to continue firing.

In a dissent, Justice Stephen Higginson accused the majority of revising an ambiguous law “to legalize an instrument of mass murder.”

In November, the court agreed to consider the case of Garland vs. Cargill to assess the legality of the ATF regulation. The Second Amendment right to bear arms is not directly at stake.

California and 16 other states had already banned bump stocks, but state attorneys said these bans will be harder to enforce if bump stocks can be legally purchased in other parts of the country.