This is even broader than the horrible allowing automatic weapons to be owned freely.
It’s an attack on regulatory authority that has been part and parcel of governance forever. Want to discriminate against LGBTQ people in healthcare? The ACA doesn’t include them in the nondiscrimination law. That’s regulatory.
Don’t want to eat tainted food or drink tainted water etc? That particular contaminant isn’t included specifically in the law.
And much more.
Justice Clarence Thomas (R—Harlan Crow)
They seem to be designed for a specific loophole in the definition.
Specifically, the ruling seems to hang on that while a person squeezed once the trigger is technically articulated multiple times.
It’s a lot hanging on treating pulling the trigger once as different from pulling the trigger once and then the gun slamming the trigger into the finger to articulate it multiple times as different.
Not more precise, less technically precise and instead function oriented irrelevant to how the function is achieved. That avoids some new loophole specific device.
Remove the trigger part and replace it with a rate of fire. Anything that creates a rate of fire faster than X becomes a machine gun. Perhaps anything that fires more than once with a single user initiation.
If that’s your belt loop, then your belt loop combined with that gun is a machine gun. If it’s your technique, then you and that gun combined just became a machine gun. If it’s that trivial, perhaps the gun should be designed specifically to slow the rate of fire and prevent this.
Well the law taxing and regulating machine guns defines one as a gun that fires more than one round with a single action of the trigger. When using a bump stock, the trigger is indeed pressed once for every bullet fired. They exist solely to get around the definition in the law. Nobody would design a firearm with an automatic disconnect to prevent if from firing full auto and then add a bump stock to make it fire full auto, except as a way to circumvent the National Firearms Act. Whether something IS illegal is a different question than whether it SHOULD be illegal. Simply changing the law so that it referred to a single action by the operator would be sufficient. There’s no GOOD reason not to regulate bump stocks in the same way that one regulates other modifications that allow one to fire full-auto. Unfortunately, the NRA will go all in to prevent this sort of sensible modification to the law.
NB watch some conservatives quandry when you point out that under the Obama Administration, the AFT ruled that bump stocks were not covered as machine guns, but under the Trump administration they changed that rule and decided that they were.
Sotomayor’s dissent really tears into that “technicality” argument:
Edit to add: she wasn’t exaggerating. The majority opinion really did include a bunch of technical diagrams of the inner workings of a gun. Ridiculous.
Yes, they are designed to change performance, while being legal. Of course, why would you design an illegal product you can’t sell? Items like these were originally signed off by the ATF before being sold.
You have to do more than just pull the trigger. If you just pulled the trigger and nothing else, it would fire once. You also have to apply the right amount of forward pressure on the stock. Not too much, or too little, or it won’t work. That’s the reason it doesn’t meet the definition, it has more going on that just " a single function of the trigger."
My precise I mean legally precise, not some guy on an internet forum text. Yes you could regulate the function, but you have to do so in a way that is enforceable.You can shoot very fast by fanning a trigger or being born Jerry Miculek, which is something you can’t really regulate.
That’s way too broad, it wouldn’t be enforceable.
But make no mistake, a law could be crafted to cover bump stocks and similar items out there. As BB article states, 18 states have done so already. The problem is with this case is that 1) it’s an executive order to 2) have the ATF decide to change their mind and reclassify the bump stock as a machine gun. You could 100% pass a law banning or otherwise regulate bump stocks.
The NFA definition was “good enough” for the last 90 years that everyone more or less agreed on what a machine gun was. Even the ATF originally agreed that a bumpstock was not a machine gun. This is hardly the first time something new is out there that doesn’t run afoul of the law as it is written and would require a new law to include it. Which 18 states have done so far.
I am still in the camp of having LE expand or change definitions at their whim is not a good thing.
Also as an Executive Order, nothing would stop a future president from ordering the ATF to change the ruling back. A law would.
“Everyone more or less agreed?” That’s quite a stretch.
Prior to the massacre in Vegas (which, by the way, likely killed more people in one horrific event than Tommy guns ever did outside of a war zone) most non-gun-nuts were blissfully ignorant about the existence of bump stocks and I personally would have considered anything in that category to be functionally equivalent to a machine gun if anyone had asked.
Allowing dangerous consumer products that contributed to scores of deaths to be sold without restrictions to the general public unless there’s an extremely specific law outlawing each new product is no way for a reasonable government to function. Broad categories with a clear intent should be sufficient. And the intent behind the NFA was quite clear.
Sotomayor, not just some random guy on the internet, goes into significantly more detail rebutting this argument.
The executive order didn’t ban them, it requested the AFT to reexamine their initial determination.
Regulatory agencies change their determinations all the time. There’s an entire process for how to change them.
Imagine what would be in “clean water” today, if the EPA could never change their determination on chemicals and their risks. Health impacts, if the FDA could never change their rules for a drugs or food ingredients. Automobile safety, if NHTSA couldn’t change.
The ATF made a call the first time. A president through executive order asked them to look again, they changed the call through the defined process for changing it. Sure, another president could ask them to look again, they could initiate the process again and see if they get another answer. That’s why there is a process and it’s not just because an executive order says so.
Well, apparently you have to use two hands to get that 400 round per minute fire rate instead of being able to squeeze the trigger with one hand while wanking with the other, so it’s an inferior product, not giving the full functionality offered by a real Machine Gun (as legally defined).
/s if necessary.
Literal technical gunwanking in a SCOTUS decision. Leave it to the conservative majority and the ammosexuals like the plaintiff to find BS arguments for putting these dangerous things back into circulation around the country.
Inspired by this topic, I’ve updated the catch-all topic.
A nuclear-armed society is a really polite society!
all right, the SCOTUS…
where is my 2A right to SMAWs?
IF - as thomas and alito seem to argue (and scalia before them) - that the 2A means there can be no laws abridging the complete and total armament of all USians, then where is my anti-tank, anti-aircraft rocket launcher?
if cops can have tanks, I can have anti-tank capabilty. FTP!
wonder what clarence and sammy say 'bout dat?!
That depends whether the regulation is defined around the object or the user. Bumps stops are a mechanism that creates automatic fire of the weapon when the user pulls the trigger once. That’s a firearm that has been modified for automatic fire, full stop. Just because the mechanism causes the trigger to be activated by a stationary finger doesn’t change the result or the function.
Let’s put it this way: an electrical accessory that mounts over the trigger mechanism and pulls the trigger repeatedly for the user, who controls it with a smartphone app. Is that an illegal automatic weapon? It wouldn’t by by this interpretation of SCOTUS.
I would definitely get off his lawn.
Mutually assured courtesy.
