Supreme Court, Nostalgic For Las Vegas Massacre, Rules Bump Stocks Perfectly Cromulent
Good Christ, we're screwed
Unfortunately, we all saw this one coming: The US Supreme Court has thrown out the federal ban on “bump stocks,” those delightful devices that allow owners of semiautomatic rifles, which fire a single round with each pull of the trigger, to convert the rifles into real bullet hoses with a rate of fire of hundreds of rounds a minute, just like a machine gun!
Here’s a brief explainer video on how the infernal devices work.
The 64-year-old gun freak who perpetrated the 2017 massacre in Las Vegas used bump stocks on multiple legally-purchased rifles, allowing him to rain .223 caliber high velocity bullets down from his hotel room on a music festival, killing 60 people and wounding more than 400 in just 10 minutes before he shot himself as police closed in. Many 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 weapon.
Thing is, actual machine guns, which start firing when you pull the trigger and only stop when you release it or the gun runs out of ammo, are heavily regulated under the National Firearms Act, which was passed back in 1934 when Americans foolishly thought keeping Al Capone from having a machine gun would be better than letting everyone have one and hoping a good guy would shoot Capone before he shot into a crowd.
Following Las Vegas, the Trump administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) in 2018 issued a rule categorizing bump stocks as devices that convert a rifle into a machine gun, effectively banning them. But thanks to today’s ruling, hooray, bump stocks will now be available to anyone who can legally own a firearm. That includes guys who wanna dress up like Rambo and fire hundreds of rounds for a YouTube video and lulz, or who wanna turn a large number of human beings, including school kids why not, into hamburger. Also for lulz.
Bump stocks were designed specifically to get around a loophole in the 1934 law and a 1986 update, which prohibits converting a semiautomatic gun into a fully automatic one by modifying the weapon to “shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” Keep that phrasing in mind, because today’s whole fucking decision in the case, Garland v Cargill, depended on what exactly a “single function of the trigger” means.
Gunhumpers like the plaintiff, Austin gun shop owner Anthony Cargill, argue that even though bump stocks can make an ordinary AR-15 shoot nearly as many rounds as a machine gun can, the devices are still legal because they use the recoil action of the rifle to “bump” the user’s finger repeatedly against the trigger, meaning that each shot is the result of a separate “function” of the trigger, even if it’s far faster than any human could move their finger without the device.
Clarence Thomas, writing for the six rightwing justices on the Court, agreed that’s exactly what a bump stock does: several hundred single functions of the trigger, not a modification of the gun’s internal firing mechanism: “With or without a bump stock, a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot.”
Who had any idea in grade school that grammar could have such deadly implications?
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, clinging to the quaint old assumption that the intent and potential consequences of laws are as important as parsing the meanings of words to give one side an advantage, read her dissent from the bench, which is what justices do to make clear that they are furious at the majority’s fuckery. As the Washington Post reports (gift link), she said the ruling
would have “deadly consequences,” adding that the court “hamstrings the government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” She also called the ruling “myopic” and eschewed a “straightforward understanding of the statute.”
She also wrote in the dissent that “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” which sounds awfully uncomplicated: if something shoots as many bullets as fast as a machine gun can, regardless of the fine details of the trigger mechanism, well then isn’t it a duck with a machine gun? Nope!
Then, we assume, Brett Kavanaugh put Sotomayor in a headlock and stuffed her in her locker while laughing and braying that’s what she gets for being a nerd, because nothing matters but winning, loser. Don’t like it? Tough.
As the Post also notes, the ruling didn’t really involve the Holy Second Amendment, but rather the narrow question of how to read words so you can keep the gunhumping constituency of the Republican party happy, no matter how many people may die or be maimed as a result.
The ruling doesn’t necessarily mean bump stocks will become available everywhere, at least not before more court cases, because as NBC News points out, 18 states have statutes outlawing them, regardless of the ATF’s now-quashed interpretation of the federal law.
And because this ruling doesn’t touch on the ATF regulation’s constitutionality, it would also be possible for Congress ban bump stocks, since laws sometimes get more respect than agency regulations. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said yes let’s do that, and called on Republicans to support a federal ban, as if any of them still had functioning spines.
In conclusion, it is a great day for freedom and for the funeral home industry. Vote blue and get these ghouls out of power, the end.
[Garland v Cargill ruling / WaPo (gift link) / NBC News]
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Hey kids, sorry about the comments being closed for a while, that was on me! Regret the error etc.
Oof, this one hurts.