Not being a gun guy, it’s unclear to me what purpose a bump stock serves other than to allow someone to shoot a lot of bullets very quickly by using the rifle’s recoil to do the trigger pulling work. They are useful to people with disability, or so I’m told, though I’m not sure why and it doesn’t really matter. And after what happened in Vegas, I can well appreciate why bump stocks can present a horrific menace that should no more exist than machine guns in civilian hands.
Your mileage may vary, but I just can’t see any reason to allow the sale of bump stocks, other than to prepare for battle with…someone.
But that wasn’t the question raised in Garland v. Cargill, and almost every outraged critique of the decision deliberately ignores the rationale for the decision by presenting it as the ethically compromised conservative wing of the Supreme Court doing the bidding of its NRA masters. They chose bump stocks over the lives of Americans. There is much to criticize and challenge in Justice Thomas’ (of all people) opinion for the majority, but at least challenge it because of the flawed rationale, not because guns are evil and bump stocks make evil guns even more evil.
Bump stock devices were banned the next year, just as all fully automatic machine guns are banned for public use, but the six conservative members of the court seemed entirely unbothered by their deadly potential. The opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, parses in a ridiculous level of detail whether bump stocks truly fit the precise mechanical definition of a machine gun. Because the court feels the need to give the greatest possible deference to the ownership of guns, however they might be used, the court concluded that they are not really machine guns, as they do not allow firing multiple rounds “by a single function of the trigger.”
That first line is correct but misleading. The issue was not whether bump stocks should be banned, but whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms has the authority to ban them without specific enabling legislation under the definition of “machinegun.” While the subject matter at issue was bump stocks, the legal issue was about the authority of an executive branch agency making a bureaucratic decision to ban bump stocks under the authority of legislation banning machineguns.
The opinion, full of lovingly detailed close-up drawings of a gun’s innards (provided by the Firearms Policy Foundation, a pro-gun nonprofit group), says nothing about the purpose of a bump stock. Why would someone buy the device and use it? Only to fire a lightning burst of rounds.
This is true, but is it relevant to the legal issue being decided? The question was not whether bump stocks were good, evil or double evil, but whether they fit within the definition of machinegun as crafted by Congress.
The term “machinegun” means 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. The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.
The issue, and only issue, presented in Cargill is whether a bump stock meets this definition, thereby empowering ATF to ban it as a part enabling a semi-automatic to become a machine gun. The key phrase here is “by a single function of the trigger.” In other words, pull the trigger once and more than one bullet comes out.
The physics of a bump stock says that’s not how they work. The physics of not giving a damn about the physics of a bump stock when it comes to weapons that can be used for mass murder says who cares? It enables a shooter to fire hundreds of rounds a minute, and wasn’t that what Congress intended to forbid when outlawing machineguns?
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in a dissent laced with astonishment at what her colleagues had done, didn’t hesitate to explain what was really happening. “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,” she wrote, and in this case, the duck is an illegal machine gun.
The ATF had taken the position that a bump stock did not convert a semi-automatic rifle into a machinegun, until it didn’t. It didn’t change the way it walked, swam or quacked, but the ATF reversed itself because the bump stock enabled a shooter to kill 58 people in Vegas.
If Congress wanted to ban the bump stock at the time, it could have. Modifying legislation to adapt to change when its original definition no longer reflects its intent is one of the basic jobs of the legislative branch. It’s not the job of the executive branch, which has squeezed into Congress’ role to fill the gap created by disfunction and paralysis.
If saving lives matters more than the validity of rationales in the face of congressional failure, then this decision will break your heart. But if so, at least be honest about it and don’t fudge the truth to pull on the heartstrings of a nation.