June 14, 2024
Former President Trump followed through. After the horrific Las Vegas shooting that killed 58 and injured more than 500, in 2018 he banned bump stocks. But today six years later – the Supreme Court said trump was wrong.
In a 6 to 3 ruling the justices said the way that Trump banned bump stocks – by having the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — change the definition of the word machinegun to now include bump stocks was unconstitutional. For the record the three liberal justices issued a scathing dissent in this opinion which I’ll share with you in this video.
But first – you need to understand this ruling was less about 2nd Amendment rights and more about whether or not a federal agency at the direction of the president has the authority to do something like this. If Congress passed a law banning bump stocks they can but the question was can the ATF make rule that bans them.
See — machineguns were banned in the United States by the National Firearms Act of 1934 there was an update to the law in 1968 and 1986. In that law machineguns are defined as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” The definition also includes “any part designed and intended . . . For use in converting a weapon into a machinegun.”
The majority opinion written by justice Clarence Thomas today went through a whole technical explanation of how a bump stocks work – including diagrams and goes into a whole discussion about what constitutes pulling the trigger. And ultimately he wrote “a bump stock does not convert a semi-automatic rifle into a machinegun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does. Even with a bump stock, a semiautomatic rifle will fire only one shot for every ‘function of the trigger.’ so, a bump stock cannot qualify as a machinegun under §5845(b)’s definition. …ATF therefore exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a rule that classifies bump stocks as machineguns.”
In the dissent written by justice Sonya Sotomayor she basically says the conservative majority is splitting hairs and making excuses to allow this particular firearm accessory to be legal and that will have “deadly consequences.” She wrote “when I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” §5845(b). Because i, like congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.”
Read the ruling here.
