One of the few huge mistakes that Trump made was back in 2017 after the Las Vegas shooting at a music festival where 58 people died. He, with the ensuing caterwauling by the anti-Second Amendment folks, commanded the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (“ATF”) to find that bump stocks, by their mere existence, can turn anything into a machine gun.
And the ATF complied.
Bump stocks are the up-leveled use of a redneck arrangement using a rubber band (at its simplest) to allow a shooter to press a trigger faster than most people can do with a semi-automatic rifle. But they still only fired one round per trigger press. One. Only one.
No, it DIDN’T turn it into a fully automatic rifle where one trigger pull can fire multiple rounds at a time (yes, emptying the gazillion-round magazine that the Democrats believe we all have. And so, the lawsuits ensured (Steve covered the 5th Circuit’s slapping the ATF around back in 2018) and finally reached the SCOTUS level – which promptly continued the well-deserved slapping:
The news is in that the Supreme Court, in a 6-3 decision, struck down the federal ban on bump stocks approved by President Donald Trump following the tragic Las Vegas shooting in 2017 that resulted in the deaths of 58 people. It was the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Here’s what Fox News is reporting:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that a bump stock does not transform a firearm into an automatic weapon, striking down a federal rule that banned bump stocks.
In a 6-3 decision, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote, “Congress has long restricted access to “‘machinegun[s],’” a category of firearms defined by the ability to “shoot, automatically more than one shot . . . by a single function of the trigger.”
Get that last part – exactly what I said – multiple rounds with a single press of the trigger. Or, in this case, the use of the word “function”.
It is needful that words be used precisely and in an exacting manner. They don’t care about anyone’s feelings, which is what the Left went into paroxysms over. To the Left, only intent matters and definitions exist only to be bent out of whack to suit their agenda, which, as we all know, is to eliminate every single civilian-owned gun so as to leave the Government with the Force to go all totalitarian.
Congress made the law defining what a machine gun is, and what SCOTUS did was to defer its reasoning to what Congress wrote – and ONLY what Congress wrote. What the Left and the ATF tried to do (again, with Trump trying to make political points) is “gunwash” that definition to be whatever they wanted. But that wouldn’t be precise, and it wouldn’t follow the law. Congress could have written the law stating, “a machinegun is whatever can fire 100s of rounds per minute without specifying the function/mechanism. But they didn’t. Instead, they described it by using the functional operation rather than the result.
But we, the People of the Gun, have known that for decades – Clarence Thomas made it quite plain and clear:
“Semi-automatic firearms, which require shooters to reengage the trigger for every shot, are not machine guns,” Justice Thomas wrote. “This case asks whether a bump stock—an accessory for a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire)—converts the rifle into a ‘machine gun.’ We hold that it does not.
“A bump stock does not convert a semi-automatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does.”
We hold that a semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machine gun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.’ And, even if it could, it would not do so ‘automatically. ATF therefore exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies bump stocks as machineguns.
“Exceeded its statutory authority” – 26 U. S. C. §5845(b). Funny how that is going to be seen over and over during this series. And yet, the ATF will put a microscope on those they go after, even for extremely small legal or regulatory violations by FFL or gun owners – all the while, they ignore their own law that regulates them. Hypocrisy is thy name (even if ordered by their boss).
And once again, an Executive Branch agency gets spanked properly for not following the Law themselves and committing a rather gross level of overreach of their delegated Power (and, by proxy, Trump, their boss). It was no different than School Boards trying to force people into their demanded speech when it comes to Transgender Pronouns and forcing their staff to lie to parents (yes, my favorite bugaboo still).
If the anti-gunners want to make bump stocks illegal, they can certainly do so. All that is required is that legislation doing so be written, submitted to the House and Senate, voted upon and passed, signed by the President, and not found to be unconstitutional from the resulting lawsuits. Thus far, such legislation hasn’t been submitted, voted upon, and signed.
When it came down to it, this case wasn’t about guns, the Second Amendment, feelings, or even the deadly destruction by an evil man. This whole case concerned itself with the actual black letter law that Congress wrote versus what a mere agency declared it to be from their point of view. SCOTUS ruled, “You can’t do that.”
As it should be. Yet another ding in the Chevron Doctrine that states that the judiciary needs to defer to agencies that decide to “interpret” laws anyway they want to.
I’m glad to see that the Law decides that.
