Clarence Thomas just made mass shootings easier. With a gif.
The Supreme Court's conservatives made bump stocks legal again on Friday. Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent for the liberal justices from the bench.
The U.S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority on Friday rejected the federal ban on bump stocks that was advanced by the Trump administration and defended by the Biden administration in the wake of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas where 58 people were killed and more than 500 wounded.
Justice Clarence Thomas wrote Friday’s opinion for the court rejecting the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rule that banned bump stocks like that used by the Las Vegas shooter to convert a semiautomatic weapon into a gun that can shoot between 400 and 800 rounds a minute.
To do so, Thomas held that bump stocks do not convert a semiautomatic weapon into a “machinegun,” making it illegal.
“Nothing changes when a semiautomatic rifle is equipped with a bump stock. The firing cycle remains the same. Between every shot, the shooter must release pressure from the trigger and allow it to reset before reengaging the trigger for another shot,” Thomas wrote. “A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate ‘functions’ of the trigger.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent for the liberal justices from the bench on Friday, something that justices do rarely but generally to draw more attention to — or highlight strong disagreement with — a majority decision. Unlike oral arguments, however, the court is yet to livestream opinion announcements. Under current practice, anyone not at the court on Friday will not be able to hear Thomas or Sotomayor’s statements until the fall, when the opinion audio is turned over to the National Archives.
To Thomas’s point, she wrote in her dissent, “The majority looks to the internal mechanism that initiates fire, rather than the human act of the shooter’s initial pull, to hold that a ‘single function of the trigger’ means a reset of the trigger mechanism. Its interpretation requires six diagrams and an animation to decipher the meaning of the statutory text.”
She continued: “Regardless of what is happening in the internal mechanics of a firearm, if a shooter must activate the trigger only a single time to initiate a firing sequence that will shoot ‘automatically more than one shot,’ that firearm is a ‘machinegun.’”
To highlight areas where Thomas, in other situations, otherwise finds extremely relevant, Sotomayor also notes how the language at issue was thought of at the time the law defining machinegun was passed:
![Evidence of contemporaneous usage overwhelmingly sup- ports that interpretation. The term “ ‘function of the trig- ger’ ” was proposed by the president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) during a hearing on the National Fire- arms Act before the House. ... Distinguishing a machinegun from a pistol, the NRA president emphasized that for a pis- tol “[y]ou must release the trigger and pull it again for the second shot to be fired.” Id., at 41. He did not say “the hammer slips off the disconnector just as the square point of the trigger rises into the notch on the hammer . . . thereby reset[ting the trigger mechanism] to the original position.” Ante, at 11. He instead emphasized the action of the shooter, who must repeatedly activate the trigger for each shot. ...](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6745e026-ff01-4815-af24-25fb7ad77c58_1122x1318.png "Evidence of contemporaneous usage overwhelmingly sup- ports that interpretation. The term “ ‘function of the trig- ger’ ” was proposed by the president of the National Rifle Association (NRA) during a hearing on the National Fire- arms Act before the House. ... Distinguishing a machinegun from a pistol, the NRA president emphasized that for a pis- tol “[y]ou must release the trigger and pull it again for the second shot to be fired.” Id., at 41. He did not say “the hammer slips off the disconnector just as the square point of the trigger rises into the notch on the hammer . . . thereby reset[ting the trigger mechanism] to the original position.” Ante, at 11. He instead emphasized the action of the shooter, who must repeatedly activate the trigger for each shot. ...")
Instead of what was understood at the time, we instead got a gif from Thomas on Friday. Would that I were kidding. After going through his figures, Thomas drops a footnote to what Sotomayor referenced as an “animation.”
At which link we get this:
It’s a ruling that completely averted its eyes from the history that led to the law’s massage — specifically down to the flexibility written into the definition.
Justice Sam Alito, in his concurrence, dismissively stated that “there is simply no other way to read the statutory language” than Thomas did — not even engaging with Sotomayor’s dissent or the underlying ATF rule at issue. He did, however, go on to note that “Congress can amend the law” to ban bump stocks, calling it a “simple remedy.”
Congress can do so, yes, but it should not be necessary. And, if politics prevents such a quick fix from being implemented, and a mass shooting made more deadly by use of bump stocks happens in the interim, there will be much blame to go around — but a significant part of it will fall on Thomas and Alito, as well as Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.
In her conclusion on Friday, Sotomayor highlighted both the illogical nature of the conservative majority’s decision — and the ramifications.
“Just like a person can shoot ‘automatically more than one shot’ with an M16 through a ‘single function of the trigger’ if he maintains continuous backward pressure on the trigger, he can do the same with a bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle if he maintains forward pressure on the gun,” she wrote. “Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences.”
Reading that last paragraph, I am struck by the fact that THIS is what sane people are reduced to having to argue in this country. Anywhere else in the world this would be a parody, a joke, that THAT'S what we're debating. In the United States it's somehow reality. We are completely mad.
Yet a newly fertilised ovum is sacrosanct.