Supreme Court Overturns Bump Stock Ban
DUH: “A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger.'”
The Supreme Court overturned the government’s ban on bump stocks, 6-3.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The bump stock ban began under the Trump administration after the 2017 Las Vegas massacre. Biden’s DOJ defended the ban.
Michael Cargill, owner of Central Texas Gun Works and Army veteran, sued the government when the ATF forced him to hand over several bump stocks.
The administration classified bump stocks as “machineguns.”
SCOTUS ruled that the ATF overstepped its statutory authority by issuing the rule.
The bump stock does nothing of that sort. It makes it easier to pull the trigger, but you still have to pull the trigger for every round fired.
Justice Clarence Thomas acknowledged the truth in the majority opinion:
(a) A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a “machinegun” as defined by §5845(b) because: (1) it cannot fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger” and (2) even if it could, it would not do so “automatically.” ATF therefore exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies bump stocks as machineguns. P. 6.
(b) A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock does not fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.” The phrase “function of the trigger” refers to the mode of action by which the trigger activates the firing mechanism. No one disputes that a semiautomatic rifle without a bump stock is not a machinegun because a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot. And, any subsequent shot fired after the trigger has been released and reset is the result of a separate and distinct “function of the trigger.” Nothing changes when a semiautomatic rifle is equipped with a bump stock. Between every shot, the shooter must release pressure from the trigger and allow it to reset before reengaging the trigger for another shot. A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate “functions” of the trigger.
Public pressure led Congress to start writing legislation to ban bump stocks.
However, at the same time, the ATF decided to reinterpret the definition of bump stocks.
Late Sen. Dianne Feinstein warned the ATF that legislation is the only way to ban bump stocks. She knew people would “have a field day” with the ATF.
Cargill posted a video on Twitter. Good for him. Thank you, sir, for defending our rights.
I WON 6-3 Garland vs Cargill@centexguns @ComeAndTalkIt @NCLAlegal #bumpstock #CargillVGarland pic.twitter.com/g3K7FcGU6g
— Michael Cargill (@michaeldcargill) June 14, 2024
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Comments
Now, if the Supreme Court could just have some authority and send
peoplebureaucrats to prison for violating citizens’ constitutional limits, we might be on to something.Or, maybe we could start a pitchfork and torch concession on the outer edge of DC….
Pitchfork and torch? Pffft. I like how they dealt with “political irresponsibility” in Lone Star Planet by H. Beam Piper.
I have a 12Ga bullpup that would love bump stock, the only question is could take the recoil?
The great irony of this case was that the Chief Bureaucrat responsible was Donald “I will never infringe your Second Amendment” Trump. We must make sure he never forgets that we know what a tool he is capable of being.
An alternative view I would be that his decision to authorize a new rule headed off Congress from passing a more complicated and far reaching bill that would impact all semi-auto firearms.
If you doubt that the left wants to eliminate all sem-autos, read the full dissents (which are longer than the decision). If the dissenting view prevailed, all semiautos would be on the chopping block.
You do realize that within the confines of your argument as you presented here, nothing would preclude Congress under a d/prog majority + a d/prog POTUS from passing and signing such a ban into law instead of attempting it via regulation?
After all those conditions existed for the first two years of the Biden Admin and neither Schumer nor Pelosi brought legislation to Biden’s desk. IMO it wasn’t an ATF rule but rather the very likely political consequences to follow such legislation in rural States with d/prog Senators that served to put the brakes on it. The DC d/prog have their own version of Kabuki theater with their base.
Trying to sell us on the idea that I should thank any political figure who infringes on 2A or other Constitutional rights b/c it was really all about an effort to thwart or frustrate a more permanent or a greater infringement by d/prog is gonna be a tough one.
We certainly know that he took some very bad advice from some deep state hacks. Let’s see if he learned his lesson.
This wasn’t advice from anyone, it was his own initiative. He explicitly said “ban them first and worry about the constitution later”. His instincts are still those of a liberal Democrat, because at core that’s what he still is. So elect him, but don’t trust him.
Yeah. In many ways DJT has the policy preferences of a late ’80s/’90s democrat back when d/prog still cared about preventing illegal immigrants, still GAF about the middle class, demanded some level of competence from gov’t and in general still put the interests of the Nation as whole if not first at least prominently into their thining.
It just shows how extreme the d/prog party policies have become and how far to the left the d/prog leadership class has moved in a few decades.
“We must make sure he never forgets that we know what a tool he is capable of being.”
Oh, The Screaming Ds never got that they could have tempted him into near anything, if only they’d let it look like a win for him.
Prosecuting people is not a judicial function. We do not want to become like European countries where courts can take it upon themselves to prosecute people.
“Tar and Feathering” would be watched by millions. Do pay-for-view and it would erase the national debt.
What part of – shall not be infringed – is confusing.
Taxpayer – as I noted below, this case was strictly about statutory interpretation.
and yet 3 justices still couldn’t bring themselves to do that.
What a shock that 3 political hacks installed on the bench followed the agenda of the democraps. I’m shocked………….
It’s not clear that a ban on bump stocks, if Congress chose to enact one, would be an infringement. This case didn’t claim it was; it was simply about whether the statute Congress made could be interpreted that way.
ATF, EPA, DHS, and all the other 3- and 4-letter agencies and administrations should have their abilities to issue rules and regulations eliminated. Only Congress should have the ability to create such rules and regulations, and they should not be enacted unless and until they are signed into law by the President.
Until then, we have Regulation Without Representation.
It’s Congress that authorizes agencies to make regulations, and that’s constitutional so long as they stay within the broad parameters that Congress gives them.
What should be, though, and used to be until the Supreme Court unfortunately overturned it, is that either house of Congress should be able to overturn regulations within a reasonable time from when they’re issued, rather than it requiring new legislation. The whole idea behind agencies making regulations is that they’re doing what Congress told them, so either house should be able to say “That’s not what we meant”. It shouldn’t matter that the other house likes the rule; both houses’ implicit consent should be required, so one house should be able to say “no, we don’t consent”.
This case was a statutory interpretation case, not a 2A case.
Banning machine guns is constitutional and not barred by 2A. Thomas’s opinion and alito’s concurrence made clear the sole issue was the correct interpretation of the statute. Conclusion was that the ATF exceeded the statutory authority to include bump stock in the definition of machine guns
Note that I am very much a supported of 2A
Explain how banning machine guns is not an infringement.
It’s not about banning machine guns. It’s about the ATF not having the authority to expand the definition of “machine gun” to include anything they want.
I was asking Joe-Dallas to explain his position in the statement
Separate from the discussion of the case proper.
Banning machine guns is not a constitutional action. The best explanation of this comes from the 1934 Congressional Record testimony that explains the how and why. Congress has a taxing authority, and NFA ’34 was a tax-centric regulation — because a ban was not constitutional. The closest-in-time litigation on this was Miller, and that was an orphaned remand. We are still waiting for the court to come back and clarify if shotguns have a military purpose. Since short-barreled shotguns were issued in WWI, the answer is clearly yes. There is hardly any reason to have a parallel analysis of machine guns under the Miller standard. Machine guns have a military purpose, and even The Fat Latina would have to agree. If machine guns need analysis, the Letters of Marque and reprisal analysis certainly requires easy access to such items.
The ruling today was strictly procedural. The ATF never had the power/scope to alter the law. That is the role of congress. This whole area is very messy. Why is that? Because the NFA was never constitutional, and would certainly fail a well-argued Bruen test.
Recent gun legislation relies on Commerce Clause theory — because the Feds stopped collecting the machine gun tax. But CC theory is very weak in this area because the 2nd is superseding law. One can argue about CC regulation of wheat, but the 2nd supersedes the CC and covers the area of “arms”.
The issue of compensation seems to have already been covered in the recent raisin double header. See Horne v. US DOA. There certainly was a taking here in sense clarified in Horne.
Machine guns were only constrained starting with the 1934 act…. a tax to avoid 2A issues. The Act came about from organized crime using them to rub out competition during Prohibition and especially The Valentine’s Day Massacre. A historical note…. the first machine gun used by the US military was donated to the Rough Riders by Tiffany’s of New York.. a Colt “potato digger”.
where in the second amendment is there a restriction on types of firearms?
Or any arms, for that matter? Knives, clubs, etc all protected.
Miller found that it only protects weapons that have a military use. Heller either extended or changed that to weapons that are commonly used for self-defense.
Amendments don’t usually specify their own exceptions. The first amendment doesn’t specify what restrictions on speech don’t abridge the freedom; so we shouldn’t expect the second to specify what restrictions on weapons don’t infringe the right. What we know is that some restrictions on speech are not abridgements, and some restrictions on guns are not infringements, and it’s up to the courts to determine exactly what those exceptions are.
Weapons of mass destruction seem like an acceptable limit. Beyond that though? Seems hard to justify.
Before, at and after the founding of the USA private ownership cannon, mortars, all types of firearms, privately owned/operated ships that mounted significant size batteries of cannon had lots of military grade small arms along with pikes, cutlass, swords, dirks and so on were commonplace. As were the same sorts of things in private hands along the western frontier areas.
In sum there were no widespread restrictions on private ownership of any weaponry based on the type of weapon. There may have been a very few urban locations restrictions that carrying a dirk in public was prohibited but not, so far as I am aware, any widespread prohibition on private ownership of any particular model of weapon or any entire class or category of weaponry.
Justifying a measure is a matter of policy, not law, so it belongs with the legislators and regulators, not with the courts. The only question courts are equipped to handle is not whether a measure is justified but whether it’s legal.
So the question is whether a ban on bump stocks infringes the right to keep and bear arms. Had they existed in 1790 and someone proposed to ban them, would people then have seen that as an infringement. In Bruen the court said that without a time machine, the best way to figure out what people back then would have thought of such a measure is to look for a comparable measure that was proposed then, and see whether people accepted it or objected to it. That’s a good test if you can find such a measure, but if you can’t then we just don’t know how it would have been regarded.
In the same way, we know that some restrictions on speech don’t abridge the freedom of speech, and would have been considered acceptable in the 1780s. But we have a list of all these exceptions, and the courts have already announced that they don’t consider it likely that there are any more exceptions that haven’t yet been discovered.
Milhouse
I agree with your comment about applying the logic of Bruen, that was a major point of my post. Absent clear evidence of historical restrictions before/during after the founding (immediately after/no more than one generation) period then any restrictions are inconsistent with the social/legal understanding/philosophy of the founders/period of the founding that undergirds our Constitution.
I must disagree about ‘justification’. No practice that is unconstitutional is justified simply due to a majority wishing to impose a particular policy preference. The Constitution is, IMO, much like the left/right safety limits of a firing range; we must not exceed the boundaries and must act with extreme caution when approaching those limits to be doubly damn sure we we don’t go over them.
There are no ‘exceptions’.
Any restriction on the absolute right of free speech is unconstitutional.
Any restriction on the absolute right to bear arms is unconstitutional.
I don’t care how many worthies have opined or ruled otherwise. They are wrong.
The people who wrote the Constitution used terms like ‘no law’ and ‘shall not be infringed’ because they knew all too well that tyranny creeps in with interpretors.
As is so sadly evident today and we whine and scrape to try to stop it.
It’s a filthy interpretation, in view of the historical fact that for years the BATF had insisted that there was nothing problematic about bump stocks, then suddenly did a 180 and declared them contraband, to be surrendered without recompense. A child could correctly determine that this was a purely political action.
No, it’s not constitutional and machine guns are not banned. You can own one if you have the cash and can legally own a firearm in most jurisdictions.
Only if it was made before 1986.
That is SCOTUS’s long-standing position, which it keeps affirming, but it seems to me that it’s pretty difficult to defend.
I think there’s a much better case for allowing a ban (by Congress) on bump stocks than on actual machine guns.
Where does one draw the line on limits to bans? I read an article about a museum collection of flintlock rifles describes as “deadly as ever”. I noted a comment on facebook…”no government give the people the knowledge and tools to overthrow it.”
The goal is to make firearms… “safe, legal and rare.”
The line is where people would have put it in the 1790s. Any time there’s a proposal to restrict weapons, the question to ask is, “If someone had proposed this in the 1790s, would people have been OK with it, or would they have objected that it infringes the right to keep and bear arms, which was a right they clearly had strong feelings about?”
I think it’s difficult to argue that they would have been OK with restrictions on machine guns, but it’s a lot easier to argue that they’d have been OK with banning bump stocks.
And yet to date SCOTUS accepts the legal treatment of machine guns without question.
I agree. Looking at the Revolutionary War, the Americans used rifled long guns (Pennsylvania/Kentucky) that upped the ante for long range use. The British didn’t have anything like that although they had the Ferguson and air rifles. It wouldn’t be a stretch to see Washington and Green using machine guns. The British only were able to effectively defeat the Zulu with the introduction of the Gattling Gun.
Bruen included “self defense” which is now the Left’s excuse to limit firearms… now to ONLY encompass self-defense and ONLY for within the home.
One must draw the line to preserve semi-autos. The Rhodesians, critically reduced in access to ammo, went to semi-auto to fight Zipra and Zanla armed with AKs. The goal, of course, is to make government totally in control having rendered voting useless. If the Left didn’t feel that they had total control they wouldn’t be banning anything they needed.
The ATF has probably cooked its own goose in this case. Perhaps 25 years ago they stormed into the NRA Museum and confiscated a trilling, declaring it to be a machine gun. Well, if it is a machine gun, and it was a colonial-era weapon, then the ATF seems to have invalided the machine gun taxation scheme based on its own finding that there were colonial-era machine guns. Bruen has created some odd results.
At what point does one differentiate the multiple projectiles from a cannon from the multiple projectiles from a machine gun? Does a punt gun full of .30-’06 bullets make a machine gun?
The push in the 1960s to outlaw taxes on rights also comes after the assertion by the NFA ’34 that rights can be taxed. As I always do, because it is a great illustration, I bring the 13th into the discussion. Can anybody imagine proposing that black men need to pay a tax to exercise their rights to not be slaves? Why do we consider it OK to tax the exercise of 2nd?
Command-liner:
Since “all rights have limitations” as Biden often says…. then there is a limitation on the prohibition on slavery.
I am disappointed in two ways – 1: no penalty for the agency or the bureaucrats who issued the illegal rule; 2: They didn’t acknowledge that the NFA and its successors violate the 2nd amendment and are thus unconstitutional, and the ATF should be dissolved.
Out of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, only Tobacco is within the remit of the federal government to regulate. Alcohol was given to the states by the 21st, and both firearms and explosives were scluded from their purview by the 2nd.
The wide latina once again shares her baffling illiteracy on the subject of firearms.
and also the one that has no idea what a woman is truly believes that a bump stock can make it fore 800 rounds per second,…as stated in oral arguments
Yeah….math is fine on the chalk board but extrapolating the math to reality requires common sense. If I can perform 40 push ups in a single minute it doesn’t follow that I can perform 2,400 push ups in an hour much less 57,600 push ups per day. Pretty sure the 800 rounds claim was supposed to be per minute derived by X a theoretical rate over small time increment to a per minute basis. In any event a semi auto isn’t designed to withstand a rate a fire of 800 rounds per minute nor does a reliable ammunition source device exist to feed 800 rounds for a semi auto rifle.
I always wonder where these 800rd magazines are at.
She said stores should not be allowed to stock bumpers that have been removed from little baby buggies because they will cause the firearm to shoot every time someone bumps it.
She noted that Georgia attempted to circumvent the Bum Stock ban by calling them Fani Stocks.
Justice Jackson is not an armorer so how can she know what a bump stock is?
Sotomayer was even more at sea. She actually wrote that if something looks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, she is going to conclude it is a duck. I am beginning to understand how liberals have become so hopelessly confused about sexual issues.
Justice Jackson noted that Justice Sotomayor isn’t qualified to call something a duck since she is not a biologist.
Would be interesting to know how many times all three Democrat appointees have agreed with each other vs being split by a decision (ie one or two voting one way and one voting the other) cause they do seem to always be voting together a lot of the time?? 🤔🤷♂️
SCOTUSblog is a good reference source if you wanted to conduct the analysis yourself. Heck Justice Jackson only has two terms at SCOTUS so even if you can’t find a previously compiled ‘how they voted list’, which almost certainly already exists somewhere, it would only be about 250ish opinions to skim through and create one.
Chevron is coming up boys and girls. Dare we hope this is a sign the administrative state might finally have some brakes put on it?
That would be nice, but I don’t think this case gives us any clue how that’s going to go.
The media is playing the 6-3 split as having occurred “along ideological lines.” Not so. The split was between 6 justices with good reading comprehension skills and 3 with no (or abysmal) reading skills.
If we have 3 justices on SCOTUS who can barely read or understand English, how can they be expected to untangle complex legal issues?
unable to read !
that is awful rude comment about the wise latino
that is also a rude comment about the justice that is not a biologist
Sarc
Can someone point to a precis of the reasoning of the dissents?
Or am I gonna have to read the originals.