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In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines Friday, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority decided that congressional intent be damned in siding with a plaintiff who had sued against the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives ' determination that bump stocks basically turned legal firearms into prohibited machine guns.
The ruling penned by Justice Clarence Thomas tortured the dictionary in differentiating shots fired from a single pull of a trigger to those fired as a bump stock keeps a weapon pushing up against a shooter’s trigger pull.
Being a lawyer of any kind, particularly one charged with issuing the final say on the meaning of law and the Constitution, comes with a certain amount of parsing technicalities. That’s inevitable, but also gives justices cover to lean so heavily on the technicalities as to basically ignore everything else.
As into the weeds of definitions as this decision tries to get, the question that was before the justices was a simple one: What is a bump stock, exactly? What does it do?
Bump stocks are additions to firearms that permit them to fire automatically, and no, just because the motion that allows automatic firing happens outside instead of inside the weapon doesn’t mean this isn’t what’s happening while the trigger is squeezed. This automatic rate of fire makes the gun what’s known colloquially and under law as a “machine gun.” Both these guns and accessories that convert other guns into them are banned, which makes the bump stocks unlawful under federal law. That’s it.
Questions over whether the movement of the gun around the depressed trigger count as separate actuations of the trigger are distractions from the basic and obvious truth that everyone — from the gun restriction groups to the people who actually make, market and sell the bump stocks themselves — knows well.
