Clarence Thomas' Opinion Legalizing Bump Stocks Is Indefensible [View all]

[Nevilledog]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/06/supreme-court-opinions-clarence-thomas-bump-stocks-gun-fetishist.html

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority carved a huge loophole into the federal prohibition against machine guns on Friday, striking down a bump stock ban first enacted in 2018 by the Trump administration. Its 6–3 decision allows civilians to convert AR-15–style rifles into automatic weapons that can fire at a rate of 400–800 rounds per minute. One might hope a ruling that stands to inflict so much carnage would, at least, be indisputably compelled by law. It is not. Far from it: To reach this result, Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion for the court tortures statutory text beyond all recognition, defying Congress’ clear and (until now) well-established commands. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in dissent, the supermajority flouts the “ordinary meaning” of the law, adopting an “artificially narrow” interpretation that will have “deadly consequences.” This Supreme Court will be squarely at fault for the next mass shooting enabled by a legal bump stock.

Friday’s decision, Garland v. Cargill, is not a Second Amendment case. The plaintiffs do not (yet) argue that the Constitution guarantees a right to own bump stocks. Rather, they claim that the Trump administration stretched existing law too far when it outlawed bump stocks following the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. The gunman committed that massacre with the assistance of a bump stock, allowing him to murder 60 people in 10 minutes from 490 yards away, the deadliest single-gunman mass shooting in U.S. history. To use this device, a gunman attaches it to his AR-15, then holds his finger on the trigger and leans forward to maintain pressure on the bump stock. A semiautomatic requires the shooter to pull the trigger to fire each round. When done correctly, by contrast, “bump firing” can then unleash a spray of bullets without repeated pulls of the trigger, and at the rate of an automatic weapon. This barrage is audible in many videos of the Las Vegas shooting; victims were mowed down in rapid succession because the bump stock enabled nonstop fire.

For years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives had been monitoring these devices; the agency found some unlawful, depending on their precise mechanisms, but did not take a formal position overall. The Las Vegas shooting prompted ATF to conclude that bump stocks transform semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, rendering them illegal under a long-standing federal statute. That’s because this law bans “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively” for “converting a weapon into a machinegun.” And a “machinegun” is defined as any firearm that fires “automatically” by “a single function of the trigger.” After extensive deliberation, ATF found that bump stock–equipped rifles do exactly that.

Now the Supreme Court has decided that it understands firearms better than the ATF. Thomas’ majority opinion reads like the fevered work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even a GIF. The justice, who worships at the altar of the firearm, plainly relished the opportunity to depict the inner workings of these cherished tools of slaughter. (It’s no surprise that he borrowed the images from the avidly pro-gun Firearms Policy Foundation.) To reach his preferred result, Thomas falsely accused ATF of taking the “position” that bump stocks were legal, then “abruptly” reversing course after the Las Vegas shooting. This account is dead wrong: ATF took a careful, case-by-case view of different bump stock–like devices as gunmakers developed them, deeming some permissible and others unlawful. The gun industry pushed these devices into the mainstream by deceiving ATF about their purpose; in one case, for instance, a manufacturer won approval from the agency by claiming a bump stock was designed to accommodate people with limited hand strength—then turned around and marketed it as the next best thing to a machine gun.

*snip*