The TLDR of the opinion is that they held the BATFE acted outside of statutory authority, acting as the legislature making new law with the administrative policy.
So they can approve the sales, but can’t take it back?
They were found to not be machine guns per the statutory definition. So they can’t arrest people for having one (unless a new law is passed). Prior to the BATFE’s policy change they didn’t ‘approve the sales’ more so they didn’t bar the sales.
Twaz the way it was always going to go. There is very specific wording for what is a machine gun, and a bump stock did not meet it.
The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.
While I have not followed this case or read this ruling, bolded section would appear to be true (maybe, I can think of reasons that it could be seen differently). However, that doesn’t mean that bump stocks are legal. It just means that the case before the court was to decide whether a bump stock turned a semiauto into a “machine gun.”
It would be elementary to make bump stocks illegal, because bump stocks are not firearms. Making bump stocks illegal wouldn’t cross the Second Amendment.
It would be elementary to make bump stocks illegal, because bump stocks are not firearms. Making bump stocks illegal wouldn’t cross the Second Amendment.
Correct. The issue was that the ATF tried to do an end-run around the legal process. Somebody in there did not watch that Schoolhouse Rock song about how bills become law… All that has to happen (federally, anyway) is that Congress must pass a law prohibiting them and the president has to sign it. But that’s not what happened. The ATF – under Trump’s direction, mind you – tried unilaterally to redefine an item that is not a firearm as a regulated firearm. What is and is not a firearm (and what is and is not a “machine gun” also) is already codified into law.
You can argue for or against unelected agencies having the ability to create new regulations with the force of law behind them without involving the usual system of checks-and-balances, but specifically in the case of the ATF they have repeatedly demonstrated that they are not able to use such a privilege in good faith. They would be (and are) exceedingly likely to use it as a cudgel to play these “legal yesterday, felony today” types of games with people so give themselves excuses to kick in doors and shoot people’s dogs.
Various state laws already prohibit bump stocks. My state is one of them.
I’ve followed it and the first paragraph is spot on. But I’d argue something doesn’t have to be a firearm to be protected, see Caetano v Massachusetts. It probably would also protect other items adjacent or necessary for the intended purposes of the amendment; like some types of ammo, parts, or accessories. If bumpstocks fall into that is another question though. Reading the tea leaves it doesn’t seem like it.
But, it instead enacted a statute that turns on whether a weapon can fire more than one shot “automatically . . . by a single function of the trigger.” §5845(b). And, “it is never our job to rewrite . . . statutory text under the banner of speculation about what Congress might have done.” -pg 19
because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.
So if I make a device that spins and presses the trigger for me, then it’s not illegal, got it.
Yes. Already exists, too:
It wouldn’t be considered a “machine gun” or fully automatic. Small distinction but necessary.
Bump stocks allow for the trigger to be activated multiple times by a mechanjcal device with a single (human) pull of the trigger. The person is not pulling the trigger multiple times, even though the trigger is being moved multiple times.
I know the whole thing is pedantic legalese, but it is like saying mechanically activating a trigger rapidly with a motor activated with a single button press would be legal.
The NFA says “by a single function of the trigger”. A button that activates a trigger rapidly with a motor would be legal, because the act’s definition is limited to the function of the trigger, not the action of the controller or the mechanics of the activation. Like it or not that’s the law as it stands, and that’s the only definition that matters unless and until we elect a majority of Congressional representatives who want to change it.
In that scenario the button is the trigger. Trigger is being used not to describe a curved piece of metal you put your finger on but the input device. The oral arguments had a lot around that issue.See the reply below
That’s not actually true. It’s certainly a trigger, but it’s not the trigger of the firearm. The trigger assembly responsible for activation of the hammer and firing pin would remain unaltered, but the button would activate some kind of rotating and/or vibrating apparatus which engages the trigger assembly over and over and over in rapid succession. They go into a lot of detail about this in the opinion, including the definitions they’re referencing with the word “trigger” (pp 7-14).
You’re correct went back and reread it:
On weapons with these standard trigger mechanisms, the phrase “function of the trigger” means the physical trigger movement required to shoot the firearm. Pg. 7
Although it sounds like there maybe be edge cases where specially designed firearms are treated differently if they lack a traditional mechanism.
I think you’re right. I don’t think we’re far removed from a computer being attached to a firing pin such that electrical impulses cause microvibrations which force a firing pin into a cartridge with unimaginable rapidity. In that case, there’d be no trigger mechanism at all except a button and a microprocessor, and so our definitions will have to adapt rapidly to avoid unimaginable bloodshed.
Extending the traditional trigger’s function by adding more and more complex Rube Goldbergian designs just moves where and how the trigger starts.
I dunno about a servo/motor interface being legal, ATF went to and fro over the Akins Accelerator in the mid 2000s before they decided that it is a machine gun because it added springs to provide the reset - thus in their view it became integral to the gun like a drop in auto sear, and falls under the ‘single function’ test.
The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machine gun
The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas found the Justice Department was wrong to declare that bump stocks transformed semiautomatic rifles into illegal machine guns because, he said, they don’t “alter the basic mechanics of firing.”
The conservative majority that spent pages using circular logic to determine what a trigger is were wrong, and this quote is a prime example.
Edit: Hot damn, the dissent is an excellent tear down of how terrible the logic used in the majority opinion is.
This Court itself has also previously read the definition of “machinegun” in this exact statute to refer to the action of the shooter rather than the firing mechanism. In Staples v. United States, 511 U. S. 600 (1994), the Court noted that “a weapon that fires repeatedly with a single pull of the trig- ger” is a machinegun, as opposed to “a weapon that fires only one shot with each pull of the trigger,” which is (at most) a semiautomatic firearm. Id., at 602, n. 1 (emphasis added). A “pull” of the trigger necessarily requires human input.
mechanically activating a trigger rapidly with a motor activated with a single button press would be legal.
I believe it is. So are crank triggers, which clamp on to your trigger guard and click the trigger for you 2/3/4 times per revolution.
Which by any logical definition makes the crank (or the bumpstock) the trigger, since it is what is used to trigger the mechanics of the weapon.
I guess there i some precedent where a thing attached to a gun doesn’t count as part of the gun?
I ain’t bringing logic into it, I’m just pointing out how the law has been interpreted.
Attaching things to guns that enable fully automatic fire as it is defined by the law, i.e. more than one shot per activation of the trigger, do count, though. This includes things such as full auto sear or those fucking “Glock switches” that are so popular these days.
With a crank trigger you have to keep cranking it to keep firing, like an old wild west Gatling gun. You can’t just hold it down and the gun dumps the magazine on its own. A bump stock aids the user in rapidly pressing the trigger over and over again. You can bump fire a rifle even without a bump stock if you are sufficiently practiced or skilled.
Right, that’s the kind of thought I was having with my “maybe” clause. The operator of the rifle is arguably a mechanical part of the automatic trigger pull when a bump stock is employed, because the operator is not willfully choosing to pull the trigger each individual time. The trigger is being actioned by a mechnical process outside of the conscious will of the operator.
There is very specific wording for what is a machine gun, and a bump stock did not meet it.
Its far from specific, which is why this went so high in the courts. The wording has ambiguity in it.
Here goes another lesson we never learned
Biden needs campaign ads calling Trump out for passing unconstitutional anti-gun legislation.
As we all know, confronting Republicans with their hypocrisy will force them to reevaluate their positions.
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Are we going to tackle the dumbass pistol brace fiasco next?
Mock v Garland is the case you want to follow.
What’s to follow though? ATF or DoJ are not going to challenge any of the ruling, especially after this case. It’ll remain on the federal register, but stayed from enforcement indefinitely
You mean the “Brace Rule”? It is more than just injoined. It is vacated entirely. So it is as if it never happened.
Not 100% sure but I don’t think it can stay on the books anywhere, if the ruling isn’t challenged.
Fine by me, it was garbage law and they used illegal methods to promulgate it.
What’s more likely though is that they reintroduce the rule in some other crappy incarnation that has the same practical effect, and hope it sticks the next time.
Any word on “free” sbrs that came out of the brace rule remaining legal?
Not a lawyer but I would assume any that were registered through that mechanism are on the NFA registry. If you have your paperwork and the stamp, it is legally a registered SBR (whether you paid $200 or $0 for it). Might as well put a normal stock on it at that point.
Bump stocks are largely irrelevant since the invention of Hellfire Triggers:
It’s essentially a “bent piece of metal”. I don’t see how you could control that.
Which can even be applied to pistols:
Fuck it. Let’s go back to bolt actions. See them try to machine the spring, magazine well, and a whole new bolt.
See, you kid… buuuut…
Oh I know but those mods at least take a serious machine shop. Not a bent piece of metal.
You’d be surprised:
Hellfire trigger manipulator demonstration
On an unrelated note, here are clips of people bump firing pistols and M1 Garands
Some people honed a technique that does what a bump stock does without one. It’s all really inaccurate obviously, but also obviously horrific for soft target crowds.
Yup, all in how loose a grip you’re comfortable with.
Pass the smoked pork pls
The next mass shooting caused by one is officially “The Clarence Thomas Massacre.”
Bump stocks suck. Half of the entire gun violently shaking back and forward is just as cumbersome and impractical as it sounds. Bumping can also be done without them (sometimes accidentally, be careful).
I wonder how these arguments are going to go someday when we have weapons that can just emit a field that instantly gives people cancer or vibrates their hearts to death or erases a person’s memory. The MAGAs will all argue that is their right to leave out beacons that covers a certain radius and will just run around chuckling “you triggered? you mad bro? you got sudden bone cancer or an exploded heart bro? can’t remember your kids? cry more ahahaha” and Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas will say of course these are fine, erasing peoples minds and having them drop to the ground when they encounter certain frequencies are just what the founding fathers intended (but keep those things a long fucking way away from us, of course)
This case wasn’t about rights it was about administrative policy and legislation. They seemed to actually be subtlely nudging for Congress to act in the opinion.
They’ve been doing that a lot, and for good reason. The whole gist of originalism, and the legitimate gripe conservative scholars have with substantive due process, is that during the latter half of the 20th century the judiciary usurped Congress’ power in actualizing new legal concepts and theories by creating rights out of thin air. Even RBG admitted that Roe was on shaky ground, because in a representative democracy the only entity capable of making laws is Congress. If the law says “the sky is red”, and that law creates obvious societal problems, it’s not the job of the judiciary to say, “no, the sky is blue”. The job of the judiciary is to say, “the law says ‘the sky is red’” and that’s the law that shall be enforced, and then to interpret the words if there’s any disagreement about what “red” means. A functional Congress elected by a sensible electorate in a healthy democracy free of corruption (HA!) would see the obvious error and pass an amendment that changed the law on the books into “the sky is blue.”
In striking down Roe, they clearly signaled that the only remedy would be Congressional action. From Kavanaugh’s concurrence in Dobbs:
The nine unelected Members of this Court do not possess the constitutional authority to override the democratic process and to decree either a pro-life or a pro-choice abortion policy for all 330 million people in the United States.
The ball, one might say, was tossed by the justices back into the legislators’ court, where the political forces of the day could operate. The Supreme Court wrote modestly, it put forward no grand philosophy; but by requiring legislative reexamination of once customary sex-based classifications, the Court helped to ensure that laws and regulations would “catch up with a changed world.”
Roe v. Wade, in contrast, invited no dialogue with legislators. Instead, it seemed entirely to remove the ball from the legislators’ court.
And Roberts in Shelby v. Holder (a decision which I loathe):
That is why, in 2009, we took care to avoid ruling on the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act when asked to do so, and instead resolved the case then before us on statutory grounds. But in issuing that decision, we expressed our broader concerns about the constitutionality of the Act. Congress could have updated the coverage formula at that time, but did not do so. Its failure to act leaves us today with no choice but to declare §4(b) unconstitutional.
In short, the only suitable remedy to legal conundrums is a new and updated law. The fact that our democracy has deteriorated to the point where Congressional representatives are really just mouthpieces for interest groups and have insufficient dignity to even attempt overt moral judgments about how to form a more perfect union, explains why the judiciary keeps very clearly reminding them what their job is. Political compromise is hard and takes immense amounts of work and sacrifice, and SCOTUS is reiterating that they’re not going to bail a dysfunctional Congress out by legislating from the bench.
As a counterpoint to your well reasoned argument, you could also easily say constitutional organizists want to strip back any equality or progress our society has made via the courts. They do this by weaponizing the fact that we have a broken legislature. To achieve their goals of stripping freedom and rights from the “outgroups” all they have to do is be explicitly literal when it suits them, ignoring all intent of a law, and then the outgroups will be powerless to actually regain those rights, effectively legislating our nation from the bench.
When a law that helps people that they dont like comes before them, then they can suddenly “guess at intent” and “give standing to anyone.” A clear example of this is when they struck down Biden 400B student loan forgiveness. The law itself gave the executive incredibly wide powers, and Biden worked entirely in them to enact that forgiveness. He followed the “originalist” interpretation, but suddenly all these originalsist jusges had questions about “greater fairness” and “was this really in the intent of the law” when it says in effect “the executive can do what the fuck they want.” They even let a state just “get standing” by claiming one of its agencies would have had standing if it sued. The agency did not in anyway sue. That’s how bad they wanted to not be origionalists when it suited them.
There’s a lot in your comment that’s not necessarily right or wrong, it’s just harder for me to untangle, so instead I’ll address this very salient point:
you could also easily say constitutional organizists want to strip back any equality or progress our society has made via the courts.
The argument of originalists is very specifically that progress shouldn’t be made via the courts in the first place. It’s not the judiciary’s job to push us forward as a society, it’s their job to interpret the Constitution as it’s written. As soon as you open the door for a judge to push us “forward”, you invite them to define for themselves what “forward” means. I don’t think I can understate the damage that would do to this country if the shoe were on the other ideological foot and Christian nationalists were free to decide that “forward” means putting women in the kitchen as subservient partners in a heteronormative nuclear family. And you’re right that the really sinister problem with this particular SCOTUS is that they seem to pick and choose when they want to abide by their stated principles, but on its face originalism is more in line with what the Framers had in mind. It’s just that they also had a lot of other understandings about the American experiment which turned out to be laughably naïve.
The only way to get out of the moralizing doom loop you’re describing is to revert back to judges/justices being neutral arbiters of written law. It’s not foolproof, mind you, because it’s subject to the whims of overt partisans like Thomas and Alito, but it does have a certain philosophical consistency that’s hard to deny.
The argument of originalists is very specifically that progress shouldn’t be made via the courts in the first place.
That is what they say, but for some reason the outcome tends to be the absolute worst interpretation of words taken out of the context of when they were written and ignoring centuries of precedent. They also tend to throw out the laws that are written in response to their rulings.
Maybe we should evaluate their honesty based on their actions and not what they say their intent is.
That article has given me a huge amount of information to think about. Thanks for sharing.
It wasn’t a merits decision. It was about the previous administrations abuse of the executive to reclassify things that already have a statutory definition.
Actually I think these sci Fi guns would be struck down by the FCC. They are fucking serious about emitted radiation
SO the point of the militias were that the Founding Fathers believed that giving any executive access to a standing army would, eventually if not immediately, act against the rights of humans.
So instead we were supposed to have a populace ready and trained in military activity by the states’ ordained and defined by Congress militias.
The 2nd was to try and stop a ruler from having access to force.
And now we have a standing military, a military-armed police, and paramilitary civilians.
Worst civilization decision evar.
We are so far from the Federalist Paper #29 argument for the 2nd Amendment; we need to amend the Constitution.
federalist 29 is like 13 paragraphs it is worth reading
Maybe that massive standing army isn’t a good thing to have. A lot of the original criticisms match our current army pretty well.
The problem now is that in the modern global age we have plenty of enemies who have massive standing armies. China and Russia leap to mind. That sort of thing may have worked when America was physically isolated from outside forces by a several months long boat ride. Not the case anymore.
Abolishing everybody’s massive standing armies would be a pretty good idea, but I don’t foresee that happening any time soon.
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So how many “gifts” have the gun lobby given them this time?
Did the truth ever come out around this shooting? The whole thing seemed very suspicious and the news story seemed to go away pretty quickly compared to other similar events.
Or I’m an ostrich and just completely missed everything to do with it.
I don’t know what “truth” needs to be found. Shooter’s dad was a diagnosed psychopath on the FBI most wanted list, seems like a case of apple not falling far from the tree.
I mean the rate of fire was way higher than even a bump stock would allow and the number of shots fired would have required way more magazines than was found with the guy. Largest mass shooting in history and we have no motive, no explanation, and no resolution.
This is my point. There is no motive. No explanation, nothing.
Personally, I don’t buy the “dude went crazy” story with all the preparation that he did.
I think the media waxes and wanes on their discipline about whether to give too much attention to high profile incidents, to tamp down copycats who are “inspired” by the “glory”.
That said, I don’t think anything was really hidden from us or you. A guy flipped out and did a horrible thing, there’s probably not that much to say about it.
That’s crazy… What’s next, are they going to start letting us shoulder our pistols? (Asking for a friend)
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the dead people tax strikes again. everyone i know who owns a human killing device is top-notch at the ridiculous rationalization required to bring said evil into their homes.
crazy overlap with the ‘pro life’ camp also.
