Associate Justice Clarence Thomas sits during a group photo at the Supreme Court in Washington, Friday, April 23, 2021. (Erin Schaff/The New York Times via AP, Pool); then President Donald Trump in February 2018 announces his bump stock ban plans (C-SPAN/screengrab)
The conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision on Friday ruled that a bump stock ban supported by former President Donald Trump after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre could not stand, leading one justice to suggest congressional action and three liberal justices to lament the decision, saying “this is not a hard case.”
Justice Clarence Thomas, penning the opinion of the majority composed of Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, concluded that adding a bump stock to a semi-automatic rifle does not mean that the firearm is transformed into a “machinegun” — “because it does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.””
In February 2018, then President Trump, speaking days after the Valentine’s Day massacre in Parkland, Fla., announced plans to make children and communities safer across America, also in light of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre that wounded hundreds and left 58 dead as the mass murderer using rifles equipped with bump stocks indiscriminately fired on country music concertgoers from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
“Just a few moments ago, I signed a memorandum directing the attorney general to propose regulations to ban all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns,” Trump said. “I expect that these critical regulations will be finalized, Jeff [Sessions], very soon.”
By December 2018, the month after Attorney General Jeff Sessions was fired and replaced by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker, Whitaker said that the DOJ had, indeed, amended Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) regulations to state that bump stocks turned semi-automatic rifles into “machineguns” under the law.
“We are faithfully following President Trump’s leadership by making clear that bump stocks, which turn semiautomatics into machine guns, are illegal, and we will continue to take illegal guns off of our streets,” Whitaker said at the time.
In the years that followed, judges ruled in favor of the bump stock ban and against it, a split that the Supreme Court resolved Friday by holding that the ATF “exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies a bump stock as a ‘machinegun.’”
Justice Alito, in a concurrence, said that Las Vegas massacre was a “horrible shooting spree,” but that fact “did not change the statutory text or its meaning” — even though Alito agreed that the mass shooting “demonstrated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machinegun.”
If Americans really do want to ban bump stocks, Alito said, there’s a “simple remedy.”
“Congress can amend the law—and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act,” he said.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor penned the dissent and was joined by Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Elena Kagan.
Sotomayor said that the majority made a common sense case a hard one.
“Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of ‘machinegun’ and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose,” the justice 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.”
“This is not a hard case. All of the textual evidence points to the same interpretation,” Sotomayor continued. “A bump-stock-equipped semi-automatic rifle is a machinegun because (1) with a single pull of the trigger, a shooter can (2) fire continuous shots without any human input beyond maintaining forward pressure.”
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