Supreme Court Blocks Ban on Bump Stocks, and the Country’s Gun Violence Problem Deepens

You may have seen the headline about today’s Supreme Court ruling, written again by the gun lobby’s favorite Justice Thomas, rejecting the 2018 ATF ban on bump stocks within the civilian population.  

A difficult and fraught day for all Americans, and a bizarre SCOTUS present to the former President on his birthday.  Perhaps better to emphasize the point, a quote generally attributed to the wise and savvy Yogi Berra, “it’s déjà vu all over again!” Or simply stated, so sad and scary,

As with other recent SCOTUS rulings on firearms within US society, it is important to read and consider the Court’s arguments and reasoning.  In this case, as in the others, it is clear again that the majority justices are robotically serving the interests of the gun lobby, and are not pursuing unbiased and thoughtful jurisprudence. And it’s clear that the real world violence of 21st century America has little bearing on or resonance with this court’s majority.

Where to start with the Cargill ruling and Justice Thomas’s decision argument?

Perhaps with Justice Thomas’s simple statement: “As always we start with the statutory text”. 

In this case, Thomas is referring to 1934 Congressional legislation banning machine guns in response to rampant gangland violence of the Prohibition Era and its description of a machine gun as depending on the “single function of the trigger”.   Thomas provides a number of diagrammatic presentations (apparently borrowed from a 2016 book on the AR-15) of the functioning of a trigger, and asserts that a bump stock “merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate “functions” of the trigger.”  He argues further that that the requirement that the shooter push forward on the bump stock to maintain rate of fire is irrelevant to the discussion focused on the single function of the trigger.

That the core technical presentation representing the foundation of Justice Thomas’s brief is openly drawn directly from the amicus curiae brief of the Firearms Policy Coalition Action Foundation (FPCAC) speaks volumes about the provenance of Justice Thomas’s argument; that he gratuitously dismisses the linkage between the bump stock and trigger operation as basically inconsequential is more than disingenuous.

The Second Amendment only lurks in the Cargill background, a seeming tactical choice of the majority Justices, since the Las Vegas mass casualty event so clearly gives the lie to the SCOTUS arguments that firearm technology cannot and should not be the basis for a challenge to the Court’s current interpretation of the Second Amendment.

That interpretation is Justice Scalia’s dangerous and misguided landmark 2008 ruling in Heller which he argued directly that the first 13 words of the 27 word Second Amendment’s ratified text were basically irrelevant to the Amendment’s four word closing “operative” clause of “shall not be infringed”.  Scalia’s argument also willfully ignored the clear historical context of the role of the militia in the Second Amendment, just as Justice Thomas ignores the intent and scope of the 1934 firearm legislation.

Perhaps the best description of the SCOTUS ruling today in the Cargill case is that counting bump stock angels on a pinhead is the foundation of SCOTUS jurisprudence, particularly when it comes to challenges to gun lobby preeminence in our gun violence-ridden United States.  You can see this clearly if you read the SCOTUS decision (https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/slipopinion/23) or listen to the oral arguments presented last February 8 (https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/audio/2023/22-915).  Too bad the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department failed to submit its final report on the Las Vegas mass shooting as a friend of the court brief at the start of the process (https://www.lvmpd.com/services/advanced-components/misc-pages/search?q=FIT%20October%201%2C%202017), which documents the shooter’s bump stock rate of fire, nine rounds a seconds at some moments of the ten minute barrage.

What lies ahead with the Brahimi case, with a SCOTUS ruling likely in the coming days.  No doubt, more of the same, or as Yogi Berra astutely predicted, “déjà vu all over again!”.  The Court’s record in firearm cases is ominous, and it is unclear whether the Court will rule against allowing threatening or dangerous individuals subject to court restraining orders to retain their firearms, including those AR15s with bump stocks, regardless of the proven threats to those they have abused or threatened to abuse.  Let’s hope that wiser heads will prevail but it is difficult to hope for that given the rabbit hole the SCOTUS has gone down since Heller in 2008.

Summing up regarding key SCOTUS decisions on firearms and danger to the American public in 2024: 

Gun Lobby 1

Average American’s safety 0

On to Brahimi.