SCOTUS May Kill 'Bump Stock' Ban So Some Lucky Ducky Can Top Las Vegas Massacre's Death Toll
Trigger warning: The case may turn on grammar. Yikes.
Back in 2017, right after a 64-year-old gun freak firing from a Las Vegas hotel tower into a music festival killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 in just 10 minutes, a lot of witnesses and people who saw video from the scene thought the shooter had to be using a machine gun, because the rate of the gunshots was a steady chatter of fire, not the succession of single shots typical of a semiautomatic gun, which fires a single round with each pull of the trigger.
And then the next day millions of Americans learned for the first time that there’s such a thing as a “bump stock,” an accessory that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic rifle to push the trigger repeatedly against the shooter’s finger far faster than anyone could manage just by pulling the trigger. Here’s an explanatory video from Vox on how the devices work:
In a rare moment of a Trump agency actually doing its job, in 2018, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) banned bump stocks by categorizing them as machine guns, which were banned for sale to the public back in 1934 because Americans at the time actually expected Congress to prohibit weapons used in wars and Prohibition-era gang shootouts. What quaint old times!
That upset the National More Guns Everywhere Association and lots of gun-humpers, so here we are with this week’s arguments in a case called Garland v. Cargill, which argues the ATF exceeded its authority because, well, pretty much because grammar.
Federal firearms law, you see, defines a machine gun as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
Aha! Gunhumpers like the plaintiff, Anthony Cargill, an Austin gun shop owner, explain that even if a bump stock can give a semiautomatic rifle a rate of fire equal to a machine gun, the language of the National Firearms Act doesn’t mention that, it only mentions the “function” of the trigger (Washington Post gift link) and so a bump stock can’t be a machine gun because it simply makes the gun’s trigger move once per shot, albeit far faster than humanly possible without the device’s assistance.
Much of the Court’s questioning focused on that very narrow distinction, and while some justices seemed to be inclined to buy the argument from Cargill’s attorney, Jonathan Mitchell, that the only thing that matters is the mechanical innards of the firearm, others were skeptical, noting that whatever’s going on inside the gun, a bump stock allows someone with a semiautomatic rifle to fire off all the rounds in its high-capacity magazine with a single pull of the trigger.
Chris Geidner notes that even Clarence Thomas seemed frustrated with Mitchell’s insistence that a bump stock doesn’t alter the essential way a semiautomatic weapon works, asking, “[W]hy wouldn't you say that you have enhanced the triggering mechanism by using the bump stock?”
Mitchell insisted that the “nature of the triggering mechanism remains exactly the same,” but Thomas wasn’t buying it:
“I think the difference is that there may be some who believe when you look at it, the nature of the firing has changed as a result of the bump stock. So if that's changed, why don't you simply then look backwards and say that the nature of the firing mechanism has changed; thus, the nature of the trigger has changed?”
At The Nation, Elie Mystal explained that it came down to a matter of perspective:
If you look at bump stocks from the perspective of the shooter, the NRA argument makes no sense. One pull on the trigger, and multiple bullets automatically fly. That’s the operation of a machine gun. But the ammosexuals do not look at this from the perspective of the human person firing the gun; instead, as usual, they look at it from the perspective of the anthropomorphized gun itself. The gun knows it is not firing multiple bullets automatically; the gun knows it’s still responding to multiple pulls on the trigger, even though those pulls are happening faster than any human could consciously produce them. The gun knows what it is; it’s the stupid, fleshy meatbags who have things confused.
You can guess which perspective the conservative Supreme Court justices adopted.
It’s just possible, though, that the narrow, mechanical interpretation of the Firearms Act won’t prevail. As Geidner points out, Elena Kagan offered a series of hypotheticals about how you might need to push a button, or two buttons, or push a button while holding the trigger to result in fully automatic fire, well would that then be a machine gun? Mitchell conceded that yes, it would, so Kagan asked,
“So now I guess I want to know, what's the difference between pushing a button and holding the trigger and pushing the barrel and holding the trigger? You've just described a bump stock.”
Hell, even Samuel Alito, perhaps trying to help Mitchell out, asked if there was any conceivable reason Congress would have banned machine guns but not bump stocks.
In reply, the attorney said bump stocks can help people who have disabilities and people who have arthritis in their fingers shoot their weapons. “There are respectable arguments for why these could remain legal as a matter of policy,” he said.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor quickly followed up, asking, “Why would even a person with arthritis, why would Congress think they needed to shoot 400 to 7 or 800 rounds of ammunition under any circumstance?”
And conversely, if Congress wanted someone with arthritis — or anyone — to have access to a deadly bullet hose, why did it ban machine guns in the first place?
We should also note that Mitchell is the ghoul who wrote Texas’s abortion bounty hunting law, and who argued that Donald Trump must stay on Colorado’s ballot because the 14th Amendment doesn’t mean what it says, so he sure has a way of charming the Court’s wingnuts. We’ll find out in June whether the Court decides that even people with aching fingers will have the chance to rain machine gun style death on future concertgoers, all so gunhumpers can show up in internet comments sections to smugly point out that the next 70 or 80 victims were absolutely not killed by someone with an “automatic” weapon, you liberal dummies.
PREVIOUSLY!
[WaPo (gift link) / Nation / Law Dork]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please subscribe, or help us keep bringing you all the news and snark you need by making a one-time donation. We promise you’ll only donate once per click here.
Only in America would someone say “We need bump stocks because arthritis”
So the border is a “crisis” but guns being the number one cause of death among children isn’t a crisis? Do I have that right?