Bump stocks are legal under federal law right now. Not through some loophole — because the Supreme Court ruled the federal bump stock ban never had legal footing in the first place. That ruling is over two years old and people still get it backwards. It wasn’t a Second Amendment case, it didn’t touch a single state law, and it definitely didn’t settle whether you can own one. Eighteen states still make possessing a bump stock a felony. Here’s what actually changed, what didn’t, and where the fight over the gap in between is headed next.

This Was Never a Second Amendment Case

After the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, where a gunman used bump-stock-equipped rifles to kill 58 people, the ATF reversed a position it had held for over a decade and reclassified bump stocks as “machineguns” under the National Firearms Act. That effectively banned them nationwide without Congress passing a single new law. That’s the part that mattered. On June 14, 2024, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Garland v. Cargill that the ATF got the statute wrong.

Justice Thomas’s majority opinion turned on one phrase: the NFA defines a machinegun as a weapon that fires more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.” A bump stock doesn’t do that, Thomas wrote — the shooter still has to reset trigger contact for every round, using recoil and forward pressure on the grip instead of a finger pulling back each time, which counts as a separate function even if it happens fast. Justice Sotomayor’s dissent called that a distinction without a difference given how the devices actually perform in practice, but the majority held.

Say it plainly: this is a statutory-interpretation ruling about what one federal agency can and can’t do by regulation, not a constitutional ruling about what any government can and can’t ban. Congress could pass a law banning bump stocks tomorrow and nothing in Cargill would stop it — several bills have tried, see below. States were never touched by this decision at all, which is exactly why the next section matters more than the ruling itself for anyone actually trying to figure out if owning one is legal where they live.

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Where the Bump Stock Ban Still Applies

Eighteen states currently ban bump stocks under their own, independent state law: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. None of those bans were affected by Cargill in the slightest. They don’t depend on the NFA’s “single function of the trigger” language at all, so a Supreme Court ruling about what counts as a machinegun under federal statute has nothing to reverse. Illinois is the cleanest example: its statewide ban stayed exactly as enforceable the day after the ruling as the day before it, because it was never resting on the federal rule to begin with.

In every other state, the practical result of Cargill is real. No federal law currently prohibits manufacturing, selling, or possessing a bump stock, so absent a state ban, it’s legal. That’s a meaningfully different landscape than the one that existed from 2019 to 2024, when the federal rule made bump stocks illegal everywhere regardless of state law.

The States and Congress Trying to Close the Gap

Michigan is the state to watch. Senate Bill 224, which would make manufacturing, selling, or possessing a bump stock or “multiburst trigger activator” a felony punishable by up to five years, passed the Michigan Senate on June 25, 2025 (22–14, with a Senate substitute adopted the same day), and is sitting in the House. That’s a repeat of a nearly identical bill that passed the Senate in the previous session and stalled in House committee. If it clears the House and gets signed, Michigan becomes the nineteenth state with its own bump stock ban.

At the federal level, two bills aim to do what the ATF’s rule tried to do by putting the ban directly into statute instead of regulation, which would sidestep Cargill‘s entire rationale: the Closing the Bump Stock Loophole Act of 2025 (H.R. 2799) in the House and the BUMP Act (S. 1374) in the Senate. Both were introduced in 2025 and, as of this writing, both remain stuck in committee with no scheduled floor vote in either chamber. That’s the same fate a nearly identical bipartisan Senate push met in the months right after the 2024 ruling. Nothing about the current Congress’s makeup suggests that changes soon, but a bill sitting in committee isn’t the same as a bill that’s dead. It just needs a reason to move, and it hasn’t gotten one yet.

What This Actually Means If You’re Buying One

The federal government will not stop you from buying a bump stock today. Your state might, and the penalty in most of the eighteen states above is a felony, not a fine — this isn’t a gray-area citation risk. Before you buy, build, or even order one shipped to your address, check your own state’s law directly rather than assuming federal legality settles the question, and don’t assume a neighboring state’s rules apply to you just because the device shipped from there. None of this is legal advice specific to your situation — state statutes get amended, and Michigan’s status could change within the next legislative session — so when in doubt, a state-licensed firearms attorney is a better source than a retailer’s product page.