The Supreme Court will hear a case that could effectively legalize automatic weapons

[In It to Win It]

Vox

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear Garland v. Cargill, a case that could legalize a device that allows an ordinary (and legal) semiautomatic firearm to mimic a fully automatic machine gun that can spew multiple bullets every second.

Cargill involves bump stocks, devices that use a gun’s recoil to repeatedly pull its trigger, allowing the gun to fire as many as 90 bullets in just 10 seconds. Bump stocks cause a gun’s trigger to buck against the shooter’s finger while the gun’s recoil makes it jerk back and forth, “bumping” the trigger and causing it to fire again and again.

In 2017, a gunman opened fire on a country music festival in Las Vegas, killing 60 people and wounding hundreds more. One reason this shooting was so deadly is that the shooter used a bump stock.

In response, the Trump administration concluded that these devices should not be legal, and it issued a regulation in 2018 that determined that bump stocks violate a 1986 federal law making it a crime to own a “machinegun.” But there’s a problem: The 1986 law is ambiguous, and federal courts are divided on whether it should be read to allow this ban on bump stocks.

Had this case arisen before former President Donald Trump remade the Supreme Court in the Federalist Society’s image, it would be a very easy one. The Court’s decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) ordinarily requires judges to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute when that statute is ambiguous, and so Chevron would require judges to accept the Justice Department’s conclusion that bump stocks count as “machineguns.”

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[Kaleva]

1. It's already legal to buy automatic weapons

[Shermann]

2. It would only legalize really crappy machine guns

Bump stocks turn semi-automatic rifles in jam-o-matics. The Vegas shooter had several such rifles outfitted so that a jammed one could be tossed and replaced. This issue is ultimately a distraction.

[Kaleva]

3. I agree

[Initech]

4. Yay, more mass shootings incoming!

Fuck this fucking SCOTUS. Any blood spilled because of this is on them.

[maxsolomon]

5. No Fringements!

I expect this will be a 5-4 decision in favor of more carnage.

Will it invalidate the 1934 National Firearms Act and remove registration of full-autos? Lord I hope not, but wonders never cease with the liberalization of gun laws.