Supreme Court lifts Trump's ban on bump stocks

[gatto]

@Mister44

have the ATF decide to change their mind and reclassify the bump stock as a machine gun.

government agencies are allowed to change their minds. regulations do change as new information comes in, or new administrations are elected. that’s normal.

what’s not normal is for the court to micromanage decisions that congress delegated to agencies.

maybe you agree with the court’s micromanagement this time. but there’s going to be plenty of decisions that have nothing to do with guns that this will be used as precedent for.

the guns are a red herring. yes, they’re also deadly, dangerous, and don’t belong in our society. and yes, this decision will lead to more death. but it’s also a bit beside the point

this decision is another nail in the coffin of agency oversight

[Otherbrother]

@gracchus

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.

What makes it all the more enraging is that in his concurring opinion Alito admits that the Congress that passed the National Firearms Act absolutely wouldn’t have seen any material difference in this stupid technicality and would have considered the modifcation to be a machine gun, but he still thinks that the court’s technical analysis somehow should win the day.

Alito, in his opinion, wrote that he agreed the ban should be lifted “because there is simply no other way to read the statutory language.” However, he acknowledged that the Congress that passed the law banning machine guns in 1934 would not have seen “any material difference” between a machine gun and a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock.

[Mister44]

@Otherbrother

“Everyone more or less agreed?” That’s quite a stretch… and I personally would have considered anything in that category to be functionally equivalent to a machine gun if anyone had asked.

By “everyone” I mean what the government thinks. The ATF looked at and approved various models of bump stocks over the years (at least 10 different times between 2008 and 2017). Below is a copy of one of the private letters to the manufacture from 2010 during the Obama administration. So yes, there was a general consensus that they were not machine guns when you have it looked at 10 times and come to the same conclusion.

(Note that there have been other models that were rejected because they used springs or other mechanical devices.)

@mmascari

Sotomayor, not just some random guy on the internet, goes into significantly more detail rebutting this argument.

OK, and the majority position went into a lot of detail on why they aren’t machine guns. I guess for now, that is the legal position on the matter.

@mmascari

The executive order didn’t ban them, it requested the AFT to reexamine their initial determination.

Sort of. He said, “Today, I am directing the Department of Justice to dedicate all available resources to complete the review of the comments received, and, as expeditiously as possible, to propose for notice and comment a rule banning all devices that turn legal weapons into machineguns.”

He wasn’t just asking them to re-look at their determination, it was clear he was asking them to change their determination. (But you’re right, he doesn’t have the power to directly ban them.)

@mmascari

Regulatory agencies change their determinations all the time. There’s an entire process for how to change them.

Sure. It still isn’t a good thing when a LE agency waffles on an issue instantly making thousands of people felons after an amnesty period.

And for people wanting to outlaw or regulate bump stocks - a system that gets it “right” the 11th time it has looked at something only after the President orders you change the ruling (and could be changed back by the President) isn’t a great way of doing things either, is it?

@gatto

what’s not normal is for the court to micromanage decisions that congress delegated to agencies.

That is not what happened. The ruling was challenged in court, starting in the lower courts, and worked it’s way up. I get you don’t like the outcome, but I completely disagree with the framing.

The courts are SUPPOSED to be the checks and balance for regulations that go beyond the scope of the law. TBF, while I do agree with this decision, I don’t always agree with the courts (Supreme or otherwise), but that is part of the imperfect system we have and I don’t think is going to have this effect of “micromanagement” you are worried about.

ATF-bump-fire-letter-2010.pdf

[Mindysan33]

@Mister44

I mean what the government thinks.

And of course the government is a huge sprawling organization full of people with wildly different ideas about what should be legal based on their own political views.

People are going to DIE because of this ruling. SCOTUS is out of control and they need to corrected. They will have blood on their hands because of this ruling. They have blood on their hands because of Dobbs.

[chenille]

@Mister44

And for people wanting to outlaw or regulate bump stocks - a system that gets it “right” the 11th time it has looked at something only after the President orders you change the ruling (and could be changed back by the President) isn’t a great way of doing things either, is it?

I think it’s still a lot better than a system that leaves things wrong.

I wonder how it would work if every weapon had been automatically banned once it was used in a mass shooting, and so it was up to the gun manufacturers to make sure their products were not suitable for that. I bet you the only differences would be that a handful of hobbyists would be frustrated and a much larger number of innocent people would be alive. Being shot takes away your freedoms too, you know.

[RickMycroft]

Thomas would provide (copy-paste) an equally thick bolus about signals, wires, electrons and quantum, but it would boil down to the same word: Nope!

[danimagoo]

I see a bunch of people in this comment thread doing exactly what Thomas and Sotomayor did in their majority opinion and dissent respectively. Arguing about the technical definitions and meanings of machine gun and “single action of the trigger” and automatic and blah blah blah fucking blah. This is the problem. You’re all correct. And you’re all wrong. And so are Thomas, Sotomayor, and the other seven Justices. What none of you are are experts on firearms. You know who is? The ATF. It’s literally their fucking job. This is why we have administrative agencies. So we can have experts make these decisions and not judges. And that has been the rule since Chevron. Well, really longer than that, but that case formalized the rule that when a statute or agency rule is ambiguous, the agency is allowed to interpret, or reinterpret it, as long as that interpretation is reasonable. And both interpretations (that a bump stock does or does not make a semi-automatic weapon a machine gun) are reasonable. So it should be up to the discretion of the ATF. Unless Congress wants to take that discretion away and resolve the ambiguity. Who shouldn’t make the decision are a bunch of academic legal experts in black robes who don’t know shit about firearms.

ETA: I think it’s also worth noting that it wasn’t the Biden Administration’s ATF that banned bump stocks. It was Trump’s. This ban had bipartisan support.

[Mindysan33]

@danimagoo

Arguing about the technical definitions and meanings of machine gun and “single action of the trigger” and automatic and blah blah blah fucking blah. This is the problem.

@danimagoo

What none of you are are experts on firearms. You know who is? The ATF. It’s literally their fucking job. This is why we have administrative agencies. So we can have experts make these decisions and not judges.

@danimagoo

Who shouldn’t make the decision are a bunch of academic legal experts in black robes who don’t know shit about firearms.

Again, I’ll say that SCOTUS will have blood on their hands over this decision.

[Hanglyman]

This is a very serious, enraging turn of events, but goddamn it, this is the third time today my brain has scanned that headline and seen “Supreme Court lifts Trump’s buttocks.”

[sqlrob]

[smulder]

… instead of “bump stocks” perhaps they should be called “gun vibrators”

[ficuswhisperer]

@mmascari

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.

It’s like saying, “just engineer your stuff worse”.

[Scientist]

Does anyone need a bump stock? Can they do great harm? Should laws value public harm above technical definitions?

Fuck the definitions. Let’s have a government that values human lives over technicalities.

And there is nothing on earth I have less patience for than a “if we judge something based on the public good today, what’s to stop some one else from using it against the public good tomorrow” slippery slope argument

[teknocholer]

@danimagoo

Who shouldn’t make the decision are a bunch of academic legal experts in black robes who don’t know shit about firearms.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but couldn’t they just have chosen not to hear the case, leaving it to the discretion of the ATF where it belongs?

These academic legal experts in black robes don’t necessarily know much about abortion either, and could have left it up to the medical profession, but they know what decisions will please the far right.

[chenille]

But see, if we hadn’t been so shortsighted as to outlaw murder then we wouldn’t be dealing with abortion bans! Putting purely hypothetical problems ahead of people actually dying is a very smart and not at all disingenuous type of argument, just ask the longtermists.

[danimagoo]

@teknocholer

Correct me if I’m wrong, but couldn’t they just have chosen not to hear the case, leaving it to the discretion of the ATF where it belongs?

Well … not really. So this guy, Cargill, is who filed the lawsuit. He had surrendered his bump stocks, per the ATF’s new rule, and then promptly sued the ATF, arguing the new rule was inconsistent with the language in the National Firearms Act. The District Court ruled in favor of the ATF. They don’t have the option to not hear a lawsuit at the District Court. I mean…the defendant, in this case the ATF, can file a motion to dismiss, but there’s no way that motion could have been granted here. So then Cargill appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. They initially affirmed the lower court decisions. But Appeals Courts are interesting. They’re not like the Supreme Court. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has a total of 17 active judges plus 9 senior judges. Senior judges are basically semi-retired judges. Since federal judgeships are lifetime appointments, judges can take senior status if they want to retire without really retiring. Basically, they can still occasionally hear cases, but usually they just draw a paycheck for doing nothing. Anyway, all 17 judges don’t hear every case. Typically, 3 judges are chosen to hear an appeal. So in this case, a 3 judge panel heard this appeal and affirmed the lower court ruling in favor of the ATF. But when that happens, the losing side can request a hearing en banc, which means a new hearing before all 17 judges. I don’t know if they have to grant that, or what the criteria are, but it happened here, and at that en banc hearing, the full court reversed the lower court’s decision, finding in favor of Cargill. So then the ATF appealed to the Supreme Court. Had the Supreme Court denied cert, or refused to hear the case, that would have left that decision of the Appeals Court as the final decision, which would have been the same result we have now, except that decision would have only set a precedent for the Fifth Circuit, whereas this decision sets a precedent for all circuits. So yes, the Supreme Court could have refused to hear the case, but that would not have left the bump stock ban in effect. It would have struck the ban, but only in the Fifth Circuit, technically. Which isn’t a workable situation really, so they kind of had to take this case.

[RickMycroft]

@Scientist

what’s to stop some one else from using it against the public good tomorrow

No need to guess. Project 2025 spells it out in detail.

[jerwin]

@DukeTrout

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.

Sotomayor says

Gun owners themselves also have built motorized devices that will repeatedly pull a semiautomatic firearm’s curved lever to enable continuous fire. ATF has classified such de-
vices as “machinegun[s]” since 1982. See Record 1077. In 2003, the Fifth Circuit held that such a contraption qualified as a “machinegun” under the statute. See United States v. Camp, 343 F. 3d 743, 745. An owner of a semiautomatic rifle had placed a fishing reel inside the weapon’s trigger guard. Id., at 744. When he pulled a switch behind the original trigger, the switch supplied power to a motor connected to the fishing reel. Ibid. The motor caused the reel to rotate, and that rotation manipulated the curved lever, causing it to fire in rapid succession. Ibid. ATF in 2017 also classified as a “machinegun” a wearable glove that a shooter could activate to initiate a mechanized piston moving back and forth, repeatedly pulling and releasing a semiautomatic rifle’s curved lever. See Record 1074–1076

[simonize]

The real problem here is not that the Supreme Court ruled that a device specifically designed to circumvent the law manages to do that. The real problem is the current politics that make it nigh impossible for congress to modify the law to include bump stocks. I suspect that a preponderant majority of Americans agree that bump stocks should be subject to the same regulations as machine guns.

@DukeTrout

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.

ISTR that the ATF has ruled with similar devices that the thing pressed by the finger is the trigger, so that wouldn’t work. I see no reason to believe that the Supreme Court would not agree. B

@DukeTrout

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.

Well the SC ruled that since the law that the ATF regulation was intended to enforce referred to a single action of the trigger, bump stocks weren’t covered. Again, a minor change in the law to bring bump stocks under the NFA would be a minor change, but the problem is that the current extreme polarization of the politics of guns in America make that change unlikely.

[chenille]

@simonize

The real problem here is not

There can be more than one real problem here. See all the considered legal analysis above to show how this is also one.