The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority on Friday created a major loophole in federal machine gun laws, striking down the bump stock ban first enacted by the Trump administration in 2018. The 6-3 decision allows private citizens to convert AR-15-style rifles into automatic weapons capable of firing 400-800 rounds per minute. One might expect that a ruling that would cause so much carnage should at least be uncontroversially enforced by law. But no. Quite so. To reach this result, Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion ignores Congress’ clear and (for now) established mandate and overworks the statute’s language to the point of being completely unrecognizable. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in her dissent, the supermajority ignores the “ordinary meaning” of the statute and adopts an “artificially narrow” interpretation that will have “deadly consequences.” This Supreme Court will bear full responsibility for the next mass shooting enabled by legal bump stocks.
Friday’s decision, Garland v. Cargillis not a Second Amendment lawsuit. The plaintiffs are not (yet) arguing that the Constitution guarantees the right to own bump stocks. Rather, they argue that the Trump Administration, which outlawed bump stocks after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, overstretched existing law. The shooter committed the massacre with the aid of a bump stock, killing 60 people in 10 minutes from 490 yards away, making it the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history. To use the device, the shooter attaches it to an AR-15, places his finger on the trigger, leans forward, and maintains pressure on the bump stock. In a semi-automatic, the shooter must pull the trigger to fire each round. In contrast, if done correctly, “bump firing” allows the shooter to fire bullets at the same velocity as an automatic rifle without having to pull the trigger multiple times. This barrage of bullets can be heard in many videos of the Las Vegas massacre. The bump stocks allowed for rapid-fire firing, mowing down victims one after the other.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has been monitoring these devices for years. The agency has deemed some illegal depending on their exact mechanism, but has not taken a formal position on them overall. Following the Las Vegas shooting, the ATF concluded that bump stocks turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns, and are therefore illegal under longstanding federal law. This is because the law prohibits “parts designed and intended for the sole purpose of converting a weapon into a machine gun.” And a “machine gun” is defined as a firearm that fires automatically “by the single action of the trigger.” After much deliberation, the ATF determined that rifles equipped with bump stocks do just that.
Now the Supreme Court has decided it understands firearms better than the ATF. Justice Thomas’ majority opinion reads like the work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even GIFs. The firearms-worshiping justice clearly relished the opportunity to depict the inner workings of these cherished instruments of carnage. (Not surprisingly, he borrowed an image from the ardently pro-gun Firearms Policy Foundation.) To get to his desired result, Justice Thomas falsely accused the ATF of taking a “position” that bump stocks are legal, then “abruptly” changing course after the Las Vegas shooting. This explanation is completely wrong. The ATF carefully reviews the various bump-stock-like devices developed by gun manufacturers on a case-by-case basis, finding some to be permissible and others illegal. The gun industry helped push these devices into the mainstream by misleading the ATF about its purpose. For example, in one case, a manufacturer won FDA approval by claiming that a bump stock was designed for people with weak hand strength, then marketed it as the next best thing to a machine gun.
After falsely accusing the agency of a politically motivated change of policy and using that accusation to downplay the agency’s expertise and authority, Thomas adopted a highly technical interpretation that is inconsistent with the letter of the statute: “A single function of the trigger,” he wrote, does not mean a single function. Pull Bump firing is not the pull of a trigger, but a complete “cycle” of a spring-loaded hammer inside the gun. Because the hammer is (quickly) reset to its original position between shots, Justice Thomas concluded that “bump firing” involves more than “a single function of the trigger.” And because the shooter must “actively maintain” a specific posture to apply pressure to specific parts of the weapon, the resulting shot is not truly “automatic,” he wrote.
Sotomayor’s dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, strikes down the slicing and dicing of the provision. She points out that when Congress first banned “machine guns” in 1934, their “internal mechanisms” were “extremely diverse.” Some used triggers, others buttons. Some relied on the shooter pushing the weapon backward, while others used the recoil generated by the firing of a round. “To account for these differences,” Sotomayor wrote, “Congress adopted a definition that encompasses all guns that fire continuously without the shooter having to pull the trigger again.” That was the usual meaning of “automatic” fire until Friday. The extensive record of the 1934 congressional debate supports beyond doubt that lawmakers intended to codify this definition. And the “evidence of use at the time overwhelmingly supports that interpretation.”
But the Supreme Court has now replaced this nearly century-old understanding with a narrow, highly technical one that has no basis in statutory text. In doing so, the majority “monopolized Congress’s policy-making role,” Sotomayor noted. Its indefensible decisions have “eviscerated Congress’ machine gun regulations,” “enabled gun users and manufacturers to circumvent federal law,” and “hampered the government’s efforts to protect machine guns from shooters like the Las Vegas shooter.”
And why? To be sure, a deep current of gun fetishism runs through Thomas’ opinions. But so does an arrogant skepticism of federal agencies like the ATF and the experts who work there. The majority simply ignores the ATF’s interpretation with a sneer, prioritizing their own amateurish ideas about how real machine guns work. In the process, they disobey Congress’ mandate and do serious damage to American democracy. It overturns the decisions of the executive branch, which, unlike the judiciary, is accountable to the people.
To be sure, Congress could rethink the plan and pass a broader law covering bump stocks. (It won’t happen because Republicans would block such a proposal.) Justice Samuel Alito advised in a concurring opinion on Friday, urging lawmakers to fix the loopholes they created. But Congress should There is no need to correct the Supreme Court’s errors. In those rare cases when gridlock can be overcome, the legislature need not waste time fixing the laws the Supreme Court has broken. And the rest of us need not worry that justices, guarded by an ever-growing guard of security, will carelessly expose us to the possibility of mass genocide. For the conservative majority, this case is about wordplay and graphics. For future victims of bump-stock shootings, this is literally a matter of life and health. death.
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