The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today to overturn a ban on bump stocks, a device that turns a semiautomatic rifle into a gun capable of firing 400-800 rounds a minute. The ban was imposed in 2018 by the Trump administration after the massacre of 60 people at a music festival in Las Vegas, the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history. The shooter fired from a high floor in a hotel overlooking the festival; he used a bump stock.
The 6-3 decision was written by Justice Clarence Thomas, who ruled that a bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun. A 1986 law prohibits civilians from owning machine guns.
The question was whether the bump stock could fire multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger or required multiple pulls.
The National Rifle Association must be celebrating. Responsible gun owners are not.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Supreme Court is now so compromised as to warrant burning down. Their Second Amendment decisions represent insanity run amok. Even when they consult history, they get it wrong.
if the bump stock did not imitate a machine gun sufficiently, why did the STF estimate that half a million of them were purchased before the 2018 law?
Thomas said basically that they often fail to produce a machine gun imitation, so they are not a machine gun. So can I buy a machine gun that occasionally does not work legally?
I guess consumer choice does not define reality unless you want to promote school privatization.
ATF.
I am confused because a close reading of the Constitution does not specify that fully automatic weapons (or “arms” like rocket launchers and nukes) are exempt from the 2nd Amendment protections that Alito and company claim apply to every American, regardless of mental status, age, previous attempts attempts at mass murder, etc.
Why hasn’t this far right Supreme Court already struck down the 1986 law that prohibits civilians from owning machine guns? Maybe a legal expert can explain.
They have lied so much, or, to be more precise, they have bought Scalia’s lies so much that they are hopeless.
Their entire interpretation of the Second Amendment is so beyond reason, or common sense, or actual history, that they reside in an imaginary world.
In a normal society, they would have been committed to insane asylums long ago.
Agree. Scalia’s ruling on Heller tells the tale. He spent the whole 1st section on a fantasy interpretation of standard Eng grammar, converting a normal 2-clause Absolute construction [still normal today] into a ‘prefatory’ and ‘operative’ clause, where the 1st is merely ‘throat-clearing,’ and the 2nd is the only one that counts. Those terms are not grammatical. They are borrowed from legalese. If Scalia were an authentic ‘originalist,’ he would have known (& doubtless did know, as 25 amicus curiae were submitted by linguists on the topic) that the 2 clauses— in 1790 or in 2024– are linked causally. As in: “weather permitting, the barbecue will be held Saturday.”
Quite so. A very common construction at the time. The opening sets the subject, what follows is the particular application.
Scalia knew this, of course. He really was a big liar.
If the Court majority were really originalists, they would rule that everyone is allowed to keep a musket. Not a machine gun.
I can only imagine telling my Constitutional Law prof that a phrase in the Constitution was nothing more than “throat clearing”.
I’d still be a bartender.
Automatic weapons not mentioned? How about guns? In the 18th Century what kind of gun did they have then? That was what the framers were thinking of when they wrote this. The six originalists on the court need to look up the meaning of original.
They know it. They just bullshit their way through it.
The Amendment had nothing to do with possession of firearms. “Keep and bear arms” meant militia service. “Bear arms” was specifically a reference to military service. Hunters were not said to “bear arms”.
JRSTHETA, I concur with your plain language reading of the 2nd Amendment.
in Slate, Mark Joseph Stern writes a detailed and scathing critique of Thomas’ opinion, and discusses the dissenting opinions which properly reference history and textual accuracy. Once again, this court is all for adherence to the text—until the majority dislikes the text—and then off they go with obfuscation of the text so that it suits their friends who sell guns and pass along some of the proceeds to the men in long robes.
I fully anticipate the legalization of anti-tank weapons on the basis that sometimes, instead of a tank, the shell might take out an SUV.
I haven’t read this decision, but as a general fyi, this was an administrative procedures case, not a Second Amendment decision. The decision concerned whether Trump’s ATF exceeded its authority by classifying semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump stocks as “machine guns” (and thus banning bump stocks) under the National Firearms Act. The majority held semiautomatic rifles with bump stocks are not “machine guns” within the meaning of the National Firearms Act and that the ATF thus exceeded its authority. Bruen and the Second Amendment don’t figure into the decision.
the article from Slate I refer to above got into that a bit, looking at the language of the original language defining a “machine gun”.
You might want to read this to understand the stunt being pulled: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/06/supreme-court-kneecaps-congress-and-the-administrative-state-to-advance-its-own-policy-preference-enabling-more-mass-murders
For sure the Court’s reversal of Chevron means it’s not going to defer to ATF in a case like this. If that’s what you meant.
They haven’t reversed it yet.
And they just told the Fifth Circuit to go to hell on mifeprestone, albeit on a blatant standing violation.
I guess I got ahead of myself.
No, they’ll probably kill Chevron.
I’ve never seen a Court this corrupt.
They are likely to, ofc. And that’s horrifying. As if the career experts in various departments don’t have any expertise.
Oh, I forgot. Donald is going to fire ALL OF THOSE and replace them with clones of Marjorie Taylor Greene or stones from the beach at Mar-a-lago.
Btw, we just had the twelfth month in a row that broke all previous temperature records.
So, how long will it be before entrepreneurs start running dive trips to visit the former Mar-a-lago? And once its entirely undersea, will classified documents with nuclear secrets and information about methods and sources of intel start floating up everywhere? You know, the documents that Aileen Cannon is tanking the case against Trump for. Because if you’re president, you can violate the Espionage Act. You can do anything you want. The Trump Doctrine of Presidential Powers, which is up there with his Sweeping the Forests Doctrine and his Nuking Hurricanes Doctrine and his Shark v. Electric Boat Doctrine.
And I do hope that you all are staying away from cancer-causing windmills and injecting your disinfectants.
No, for cancer I stick with Lucky Strike menthol.
Bob, the madness never ends. Historians in the future (if they are free to publish their work) will wonder how this stupid narcissist captured the Republican Party.
It’s breathtaking. I have come to the conclusion that vast numbers of people are simply morons.
I used to work with a guy who smoked Lucky Strikes. No filter, just Luckys
I did that in college, sadly.
Marlboro Reds, then Menthols, for me for many, many, many years. And if I learned that I had a soon-to-be terminal disease, I would go back to them in a moment. I freaking loved smoking. LOL.
I always thought Reds were one of the best tasting cigarettes, but for some reason they were never my main brand.
I switched when it became impossible to buy Gitanes or Gauloises in the states.
See part 2 of this:
Oh yeah I did like those French smokes
It so pissed me off when I couldn’t get them anymore.
But Luckies are also great. “Not a cough in a carload!” the ads used to say.
It would be a terrible shame if a parent who lost a child in a school shooting had a mental break down and created a second amendment solution to our second amendment advocates. Perhaps then we could solve our mental health problems.
There is, of course, an entire literature written by genuine historians, linguists, and constitutional scholars on the meaning of the idiomatic phrase “to bear arms” at the time the Constitution was written. Absolutely Zip of which the ammosexual orgasmatists on the Court give a flying fig about, of course.
There has been far too much law office history, and far too little real history. Saul Cornell’s A Well-Regulated Militia is probably the best I’ve seen. Notably, Cornell is a historian, not a lawyer.
The right wing of the Court is pro-life from the moment a zygote exists, the better to allow its murder with a non-automatic weapon once it separates from its host, er, mother.
Or for it to become Kyle Rittenhouse
Exactly, this is the hypocrisy of rightwing nutjobs that drives truly caring people crazy, because those guys are only concerned about humans residing in a woman’s body and they want to choose for themselves which behaviors are restricted and for whom. They don’t want government help going to feed, take care of or ensure the well-being, health and safety of living people. Once folks need more than a womb to survive, it’s tough luck, baby, you’re on your own.
If they have their choice, they’ll say forget about all forms of government assistance to the average citizen. Only if you’re wealthy, don’t really need help & can buy the justice of your choice are they there for people, such as tRump his entire life (or at least until his recent felony convictions). It feels like American exceptionalism gone wild.
Russia RepubliQans need civil war because they don’t have the votes.
And so, can the U.S. citizens, SUE the, Supreme Court, if their, loved ones, get massacred, by a weapon of, this sort, at a, random, shooting then???
If a gun shoots like a machine gun, how can the Supreme Court rule that it isn’t? [The majority of people on the Supreme Court don’t have common sense.] Often, when I write my gun protest letters to my right wing extremist Senators, I comment that I have no problem giving gun lovers a musket.
……………………………………
Justice Sonia Sotomayor filed a dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Justice Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench, a practice reserved for profound disagreements and the first such announcement of the term. “The majority puts machine guns back in civilian hands,” she said.
“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,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “A bump stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machine gun, I respectfully dissent.” ” . . . .
Sotomayer is wonderful.
“I have no problem giving gun lovers a musket.” Great line!
I would still want them to belong to a “well-regulated militia” though, which has been legislated and filters out convicted felons and crazies, including personally avenging lone wolves, like tRump –especially if he loses another election, because I don’t think he could be trusted with even just a musket then…
I’ve imagined tRump having a tailor-made suit with exceptionally long sleves just so he could hide a musket in there from his Secret Service detail. He’d probably bet that if he could just slip it past them, they’d be much more likely to be looking out for people wanting to kill him than him killing others…
As Roy pointed out in an earlier comment,
“Once again, this court is all for adherence to the text—until the majority dislikes the text…”
That’s what conservatives on the Supreme Court have done for quite some time. IF “originalism” is applicable to a particular case and suits their interests, they apply it. And if not, they just make things up and lie, as they did in Heller, and Hobby Lobby and Citizens United, etc.
As but one example, in Heller, Antonin Scalia wrote for the conservative majority that interpreting the Constitution – in this particular case, the Second Amendment – means the Court is
…”guided by the principle that “[t]he Constitution was written to be under- stood by the voters; its words and phrases were used in their normal and ordinary as distinguished from technical meaning.”
Then, not far after, Scalia says that the term “bear arms” was most frequently used in the military context.
Then Scalia veers inconsistently from his earlier statement that the Constitution was to be interpreted in light of its “normal and ordinary” meaning, to say that
“Of course, as we have said, the fact that the phrase was commonly used in a particular context does not show that it is limited to that context.”
In other words, the “normal and ordinary” meaning is that “bears arms” applies to a military context, not to individuals, but since that doesn’t work for Scalia’s predetermined outcome, he’ll simply ignore an avowed philosophy of “original intent, and just make it up as he goes. Which he does.
As Michael Waldman wrote in ‘The Second Amendment; A Biogrpahy’,
“For 218 years, judges overwhelmingly concluded that the amendment authorized states to form militias, what we now call the National Guard. Then, in 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upended two centuries of precedent…“there is not a single word about an individual right to a gun for self-defense in the notes from the Constitutional Convention. Nor with scattered exceptions in the records of the ratification debates in the states. Nor on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives as it marked up the Second Amendment…when you actually go back and look at the debate that went into drafting of the amendment, you can squint and look really hard, but there’s simply no evidence of it being about individual gun ownership for self-protection or for hunting. Emphatically, the focus was on the militias.”
But not to Scalia and his conservative brethren.
Conservative jurist Richard Posner – appointed to the federal courts by Ronald Reagan – said that it is CLEAR that the Second Amendment does not have anything to do with an individual right to bear arms, but
“That didn’t slow down Scalia. He loves guns.”
Posner cited Scalia’s decision as an example of the “real deterioration in conservative thinking.”
It’s gotten MUCH worse since the Heller decision in 2008.
Here’s Clarence Thomas in the current case – Garland v. Cargill:
“A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machinegun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does. Even with a bump stock, a semiautomatic rifle will fire only one shot for every ‘function of the trigger.’ With or without a bump stock, a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot.”
That is – obviously – a lie. And here’s proof:
Now, to the AR-15.
It is, without question, a weapon of war that was designed specifically for lethality.
Eugene Stoner designed the AR-15. His family told this to NBC News in 2016:
“Our father, Eugene Stoner, designed the AR-15 and subsequent M-16 as a military weapon to give our soldiers an advantage over the AK-47. He died long before any mass shootings occurred. But, we do think he would have been horrified and sickened as anyone, if not more by these events.”
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/family-ar-15-inventor-speaks-out-n593356
What kinds of events were Stoner’s family referencing?
Mass shootings with assault-style military-grade weapons.
Journalist John Harwood calculated that of the 40 deadliest mass shootings in the United States since 1949 — defined as 8 or more people killed — 7 took place in the 10 years before the assault weapons ban was enacted, 2 occurred in in the 10 years of the ban was in effect, and 26 have taken place in the 15 years after the ban was allowed to expire by Republicans and the NRA.
Research supports him. For example, a 2019 study in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery examined “three well-documented, referenced, and open-source sets of data” to compare “the 1994 to 2004 federal ban period to non-ban periods” and concluded that “Mass-shooting related homicides in the United States were reduced during the years of the federal assault weapons ban of 1994 to 2004.”
Shooters who commit mass murders like assault-style weaponry precisely because of its lethality. An article in McCall’s five years ago discussed the trauma inflicted by such weapons:
“A bullet from the AR-15 rifle is three times as fast and as powerful as a bullet from a handgun. The bullet tumbles, so it damages a lot more tissue than bullets that travel in a straight line through the body, said Dr. Peter Thomas, director of the trauma program at St. Luke’s University Health Network…’It doesn’t create a hole, it creates a cavity in the body,’ he said…”
“The damage from a high-energy rifle is more serious and extensive than from a handgun, said Dr. Richard Sharpe, a trauma surgeon and former U.S. Navy doctor who served for more than two decades and was involved in combat operations. Treating such wounds requires the expertise and resources of a trauma center, where staff can triage quickly, draw from blood banks, stabilize patients, map out the bullet path and send people to surgery, he said…”
“Patients shot with powerful rifles typically need more operations because of severe tissue damage, and also take longer to recover, said Dr. Jeremy Cannon, trauma medical director at the University of Pennsylvania Health System who served in Iraq and Afghanistan with the U.S. Air Force. Comparing AR-15 wounds to those inflicted by handguns, he said: ‘The workload that goes into each one of these patients is the equivalent of two to three patients combined.’…”
“’The high-velocity bullet causes a swath of tissue damage that extends several inches from its path,’ Dr. Heather Sher, a Florida radiologist, wrote in The Atlantic shortly after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, last year. ‘It does not have to actually hit an artery to damage it and cause catastrophic bleeding. Exit wounds can be the size of an orange.’ “
You can see the cavitation effect here:
This recent Supreme Court decision is only going to make things worse.
Today’s Acronym • WAPORGAI
🤪 🤪 🤪
When A Pretense Of Reason Goes Absolutely Insane
It’s a challenge to fathom how educated jurists on SCOTUS would just ignore the “highly regulated militia” clause that’s stipulated in the Constitution and put instruments of war in the hands of individual private citizens, but that is exactly what they have done –because they COULD.
This demonstrates that it was a huge mistake to give ANYONE a lifetime job in a democracy, and especially SCOTUS, when THEY are not “highly regulated.” Time to change that and/or increase the size of the court, because today they are politically and monetarily motivated and clearly they are not about to change themselves.