Supreme Court seems to be torn over the ban
A New Gun Case at the U.S. Supreme Court: Why Machine Guns and Semiautomatic Weapons should be Lawful in Practice
It’s an argument that affects the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority and its inclination to roll back agency powers. A decision in the case is going to be made this summer.
At today’s argument, Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned the notion that the ATF could just change its interpretation of the machine gun law in order to outlaw bump stocks. The law was broadly written to allow for changes in the way guns and gun devices are used, according to the deputy solicitor general.
The technical question about howbump stocks work in practice is at the center of the dispute. In its brief the government says that machine guns were banned because they eliminated the manual movements that a shooter needs to make to fire continuously. And while a machine gun can fire hundreds of rounds per minute with just one pull of the trigger, semiautomatic weapons can’t do that—at least not without modifications, like the bump stock.
Yet another gun case at the Supreme Court Wednesday. The right to bear arms isn’t present this time. The legality of a federal regulation banning devices that modify weapons to speed up their firing mechanism is at the center of the question.
The regulation was not created by the Biden administration. In just 11 minutes, a single Las Vegas shooting left 60 people dead and 400 people injured, and created the basis of a new gun control law championed by President Trump.
Actually, it wasn’t a machine gun. The shooter was armed with 14 semiautomatic weapons, modified with bump stocks to generate rapid fire. The carnage was so horrendous that Trump immediately ordered the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to block the sale and possession of these devices, as they are now accused of being used to make illegal machine guns.
Machine guns were developed at the end of the 1800s for use as military weapons in battle. Gangsters used them for their criminal activities in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The National Firearms Act banned machine guns in 1934.
A gun that can fire 800 bullets a minute, a half shot, and a whole bunch of shots, says Chenoweth
Mark Chenoweth, president of the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a conservative group, argues that the character of a weapon doesn’t change as a result of the use of bump stocks.
Not so, says the government. A standard semiautomatic rifle fires a single shot when pulled, but the gun can be changed into a weapon that can shoot up to 800 bullets per minute, with the help of a bump stock. According to the government, the bump stocks at issue in this case, for instance, maintain a continuous firing cycle as long as the shooter “keeps his trigger finger stationary on the finger rest.”
In 2018, the federal government banned bump stocks for that reason, but gun enthusiasts have challenged the regulation in court, contending that only Congress has the power to enact such a ban.
“The entire way this statute is written suggests that Congress was very aware that there could be small adjustments of a weapon that could get around what Congress meant to prohibit,” said Justice Elena Kagan. “You have to apply common sense to the way in which you read a statute and realize that what this statute comprehends is a weapon that fires a bunch of shots with a single human action.”
Justice Clarence Thomas asked Mitchell why he wasn’t saying that the nature of the firing mechanism has changed.
“What’s changed, though, is the rate of fire,” replied Mitchell. “And it’s still one shot per function of the trigger, even though the shots are coming out of the barrel a lot faster than they were before.”
Yes, replied Mitchell. “Bump stocks can help people who have disabilities, who have problems with finger dexterity, people who have arthritis in their fingers.”
At the US Supreme Court, Justice Neil Gorsuch questioned the idea that the ATF could just change their interpretation of the machine gun law in order to ban bump stocks. In 2018, the federal government banned bump stocks for that reason, but gun enthusiasts have challenged the regulation in court, contending that only Congress has the power to enact such a ban.