On Friday, the Supreme Court again reduced the government’s power to protect the American people from gun violence. In a 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines, the judge invalidated the rules adopted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that prohibited devices, bump stocks, which effectively turn semiautomatic rifles into machine guns. Although the case involves the interpretation of federal law and not the 2nd Amendment, it shows that the conservative majority on the court will protect gun rights and put lives in unnecessary danger.
A federal law adopted in 1934 prohibited people from owning machine guns. Congress passed the law because machine guns have the capacity to fire many bullets at high speed and cause great harm. The law defines a machine gun as one that automatically fires “more than one shot, without manual reloading, with a single trigger function.” In contrast, with semi-automatic firearms, the shooter must release and re-engage the trigger to fire multiple shots.
The bump stock, however, allows the semi-automatic gun to repeatedly fire, at almost the rate of a machine gun. Rifles equipped with bump stocks can fire at rates ranging from 400 to 800 rounds per minute.
In 2017, a gunman in Las Vegas opened fire into a crowd at a music festival, killing 58 people and injuring more than 500 others. The gunman’s weapon has a bump stock.
The tragedy in Las Vegas caused the ATF to change its position and consider bump stocks prohibited by statutes that prohibit machine guns. It is worth noting that the new rules were adopted by the conservative Trump administration and even National Rifle Assn. agreed regulation is necessary. The rules mandate owners of bump stocks to destroy or surrender them within 90 days.
The new ATF rules made enormous sense. A weapon outfitted with a bump stock for all intents and a machine gun; Common sense dictates that it should fall under the Federal ban. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in Friday’s dissent, “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.”
Unfortunately, the court, in a majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas, decided that minute differences in bump stock weapons and machine guns meant that the ATF lacked the authority to use the rules. “A semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock does not fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger,” he wrote. “All a bump stock does is speed up the rate of fire by causing these different trigger functions to happen very quickly.”
In addition to undermining common sense, courts have ignored the principle that they should give federal agencies, such as the ATF, deference when interpreting federal statutes. It also fails to adhere to the principle that a statute must be interpreted to achieve its purpose.
Thomas’s majority opinion and Sotomayor’s dissent include a detailed description of how bump stocks work. Both agree, and there is no denying it, that bump stocks allow semiautomatic weapons to function as machine guns even though the mechanics are slightly – slightly – different. And it is also undeniable that these weapons can kill many people in a short period of time.
Why in the world did six Supreme Court justices reject the federal government’s ability to interpret federal law to ban bump stocks? The only explanation is that the majority of ultraconservatives support gun rights virtually without question. They refuse to acknowledge the enormous amount of gun violence in the United States.
Because this case does not involve the 2nd Amendment, Congress can pass legislation banning bump stocks. The gun lobby has so far prevented that from happening. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another Las Vegas-type tragedy for Congress to ban a device that has no use other than effectively turning a rifle into a machine gun.
Erwin Chemerinsky is a contributing writer for Opinion and dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law
