<p>DETROIT — A federal judge in Michigan should have blocked a Trump administration <a href="https://apnews.com/article/6c1af80fb290472c89fb930e223505af">ban on bump stocks</a>, a device that allows semiautomatic firearms to fire rapidly, an appeals court said Thursday.</p>
<p>The ban came in response to a 2017 shooting in Las Vegas in which a gunman attached bump stocks to assault-style rifles to shoot concertgoers from his hotel room.</p>
<p>The prohibition came in the form of a regulation from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which treated bump stocks like illegal machine guns. But the court, in a 2-1 decision, said changes in criminal law are up to Congress.</p>
<p>“It is not the role of the executive — particularly the unelected administrative state — to dictate to the public what is right and what is wrong,” said judges Alice Batchelder and Eric Murphy of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.</p>
<p>The court also said a bump stock doesn’t qualify as a machine gun.</p>
<p>“This is great news,” said Erich Pratt, senior vice president of Virginia-based Gun Owners of America. </p>
<p>In 2019, U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney in western Michigan turned down an injunction that would have stopped the bump stock ban. The case now will return to his court.</p>
<p>Gun owner groups “are likely to prevail on the merits and … their motion for an injunction should have been granted,” the appeals court said. </p>
<p>Decisions from the 6th Circuit set legal precedent in federal courts in Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky.</p>
<p>There have been different opinions about the bump stock ban in federal courts across the U.S., which means the U.S. Supreme Court could intervene at some point. The Supreme Court a year ago <a href="https://apnews.com/article/36d807ad9ea481fc88c7f679dbfa1857">turned down</a> an appeal, but it was a procedural step in a case that wasn’t fully developed.</p>
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