Thank you! Your submission has been received!
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.
“The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a rule that banned bump stocks, issued by the Trump administration after a 2017 mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas. By a vote of 6-3, the justices rejected the federal government’s argument that rifles equipped with bump stocks are machine guns, which are generally prohibited under federal law…
“The bump stock is an attachment that transforms a semiautomatic rifle into a weapon that can discharge at a rate of hundreds of rounds per minute… The rule, which concluded that bump stocks are machine guns, was an about-face from the ATF’s previous position, which until 2018 had indicated that only some kinds of bump stocks are machine guns. Under the 2018 rule, anyone who owned a bump stock was required to destroy it or drop it at a nearby ATF office to avoid criminal penalties.” SCOTUSblog
The left criticizes the decision, arguing that the intent of the law would consider bump stocks machine guns.
“The tragedy in Las Vegas caused the ATF to change its position and deem bump stocks to be prohibited by the statute that outlaws machine guns. It is worth noting that the new rule was adopted by the conservative Trump administration and even the National Rifle Assn. agreed regulation was necessary…
“The new ATF rule made enormous sense. A weapon outfitted with a bump stock is for all intents and purposes a machine gun; common sense dictates that it should fall under the federal ban…
“In addition to discounting common sense, the court ignored the principle that there should be deference to federal agencies, such as the ATF, when they interpret federal statutes.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, Los Angeles Times
“[The majority opinion] is a tour de force of statutory hairsplitting, which concludes that the bump stock does not, strictly speaking, make it possible to fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger… The Thomas opinion feels like the ultimate triumph of form over substance…
“The court could just as easily have determined that bump stocks fit the definition of a machine gun because it enables the shooter of a semiautomatic weapon to pull the trigger once and then, as [Sotomayor] put it, ‘fire continuous shots without any human input beyond maintaining forward pressure.’ She added, accurately, we fear: ‘Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences.’”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
“Thomas’ decision argues that because ATF previously allowed bump stocks, it’s about-face after the Las Vegas massacre makes the regulation suspect… [But] Agencies may change their minds; there is no rule that once an agency decides something, it must stick to it forever.”
Pema Levy, Mother Jones
“As the Supreme Court said in The Emily and the Caroline (1824), courts should avoid reading laws in ways that would render ‘the law in a great measure nugatory and enable offenders to elude its provisions in the most easy manner.’ (‘Nugatory’ means that the law is inoperative or unable to function.)…
“Sotomayor argues in her opinion that this presumption against ineffectiveness favors her reading of the statute, because Thomas’s reading would effectively nullify the ban on machine guns. As she writes, ‘anyone shooting a bump-stock-equipped AR–15 can fire at a rate between 400 and 800 rounds per minute with a single pull of the trigger.’”
Ian Millhiser, Vox
The right agrees with the decision, arguing that the legal definition of machine guns does not include bump stocks.
The right agrees with the decision, arguing that the legal definition of machine guns does not include bump stocks.
“The United States Constitution is extremely clear on how laws are made, and ‘a lot of people are upset about something’ lies nowhere within its instructions… [Justice Sotomayor writes in her dissent] ‘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.’ Within the context of statutory interpretation, I’m afraid that I do not know what this means…
“The question at hand was not whether bump stocks make semi-automatic firearms look like automatic firearms; the question was whether bump stocks physically transform semi-automatic firearms into firearms that, per the relevant language within the law, are able to shoot repeatedly ‘by a single function of the trigger.’”
Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review
“Sotomayor tried to call out the majority for preferring the statutory definition to what she claimed was the more common use of the words in the statute, but as Thomas noted, the Court before has concluded that ‘when Congress takes the trouble to define the terms it uses, a court must respect its definitions as virtually conclusive. . . . This Court will not deviate from an express statutory definition merely because it varies from the term’s ordinary meaning.’”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
“Justice Thomas says the ATF ‘on more than 10 separate occasions’ acknowledged that bump stocks did not qualify as machine guns. In 2018 the agency estimated that there could be up to 520,000 of them in circulation. The ATF does not get to turn something like half a million Americans into potential felons without any say-so from Congress…
“This is an especially important message in an era when regulators in both parties have decided they can rewrite laws regardless of the plain language of a statute. In this and other cases, the Supreme Court has been saying loud and clear that regulators can’t exceed their authority—and that Congress needs to get back in the business of debating and writing laws rather than ducking difficult votes in favor of the administrative state.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Any Court serious about interpreting the law as written would come to the same conclusion. Bump stocks simply do not allow a gun to fire multiple times with one ‘function of the trigger’; they help a shooter pull the trigger faster. Any functional Congress, though, would see the problem and fix the law, given that practically no one wants automatic weapons to be readily available and bump stocks make semiautomatic rifles their functional equivalent.”
Robert VerBruggen, City Journal
