O’Melveny Secures Win for Gun Regulation Advocates as Amicus in Sixth Circuit Case

In a major victory for O’Melveny pro bono clients, the firm expanded its efforts to ban the use of dangerous bump stocks. O’Melveny continued its work on this important issue by again successfully arguing, this time to the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, that “bump stocks” constitute “machine guns” within the meaning of the National Firearms Act and upheld a government ban.

This was a crucial victory for O’Melveny pro bono clients Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, Brady, and Everytown for Gun Safety, which submitted an amicus brief in support of the government. The Sixth Circuit’s decision forecloses a key workaround to Congress’s ban on automatic firearms—one that was used to deadly effect by the gunman in Las Vegas, who used a bump stock device to fire over a thousand rounds in just minutes into a crowd of some 20,000, killing 60 and wounding hundreds more.

As Judge Julia Smith Gibbons explained, the challenger’s argument “would allow gun manufacturers to circumvent Congress’s longtime ban on machineguns by designing parts specifically intended to achieve machine gun functionality with a single pull of the trigger so long as the part also requires some minutia of human involvement.”