WASHINGTON, March 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rebuffed a bid by gun rights advocates to overturn President Donald Trump’s ban on “bump stocks” - devices that enable semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like a machine gun - implemented after the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting.

The justices left in place a lower court’s decision that upheld the Trump administration’s action to define bump stocks as prohibited machine guns under U.S. law.

The ban, which went into effect in March 2019, was embraced by Trump following a massacre that killed 58 people at a music festival in Las Vegas in which the gunman used bump stocks. It represented a rare recent instance of gun control at the federal level in a country that has experienced a series of mass shootings.

Numerous gun control proposals have been thwarted in the U.S. Congress, largely because of opposition by Republican lawmakers and the influential National Rifle Association gun rights lobby.

The Firearms Policy Foundation, a gun rights group, and other plaintiffs sued in federal court to try to reverse Trump’s action. The Supreme Court last year refused to block the ban from going into effect while the legal challenges against it were considered in the courts. The justices also refused to temporarily exempt from the plaintiffs in the case from the ban.

Bump stocks use a gun’s recoil to bump its trigger, enabling a semiautomatic weapon to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, which can transform it into a machine gun. The ban required owners to turn in or destroy the attachments and those caught in possession of them could face up to 10 years in prison.

(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)