On Wednesday, conservatives on the Supreme Court pushed the Biden administration to provide an explanation for why the federal government should outlaw bump stocks, which allow semiautomatic rifles to fire at significantly higher rates of speed.
However, following the high-profile dispute’s 90 minutes of argument, the court seemed to be severely divided over the question of whether to invalidate it.
The 2017 Las Vegas massacre, in which one gunman was later discovered with bump stocks, killed 58 people at a concert and prompted the creation of the bump stocks ban, which was approved during the administration of former President Donald Trump.
Appointed by Trump, Justice Brett Kavanaugh expressed concern that unaware Americans would be “ensnared” by the rule.
“Even if you’re not aware of the legal prohibition, you can be convicted,” Kavanaugh reminded the attorney representing the Biden administration about the potential legal consequences. “That will trap many individuals who were unaware of the legal prohibition.”
The nation is still reeling from mass shootings, and the contentious argument over guns has returned to the Supreme Court’s docket with this appeal, even though it has nothing to do with the Second Amendment. This is just one of many high-profile decisions this year that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court has used to limit the authority of government agencies.
Important points from oral arguments are as follows:
According to Barrett and Gorsuch, a prohibition required congressional approval.
Whether the prohibition should have been authorised by Congress or the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was a major point of contention.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett expressed “sympathy” for the Biden administration’s defence of the bump stock prohibition, but she hinted at her reservations about a federal agency making a unilateral decision on the issue.
In 2018, the devices were categorised as machine guns by the ATF. These gadgets would also be subject to a legislation that prohibits them, which is rather old and has been in effect for quite some time.
Your argument seems quite reasonable to me on an intuitive level. “It appears that this is operating similarly to a machine gun,” Barrett remarked.
That, she continued, begs the question of why lawmakers in Washington DC failed to enact measures “to make this covered more clearly.”
Justice Neil Gorsuch, another Trump appointee, raised the same point, pointing out that multiple administrations before this one had decided they lacked the authority to designate the weapons as machine guns.
“I can definitely appreciate why these products should be deemed unlawful, but we’re dealing with a statute that was enacted in the 1930s,” Gorsuch stated. “The government has consistently maintained that these bump stocks are not machine guns, and that has been the case across many administrations.”
The liberal justices on the court appeared to be more persuaded that the gadgets were within the scope of Congress’s prohibition of machine guns.
The court should apply “common sense” in its decision, Justice Elena Kagan emphasised.
According to Kagan, the gadgets were “in the heartland of what” Congress was worried about when it outlawed “machines guns,” defined as any instrument that requires minimal human intervention to fire many rounds.
Arguments centre on the Las Vegas massacre
The attorney for the Biden administration who was arguing in favour of the ban kept bringing up the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the event that prompted the ban, in his arguments before the judges.
After the worst mass shooting in American history—the one in Las Vegas—it would have been irresponsible, according to Brian Fletcher, “not to look at the problem more carefully and take another closer look at this prior interpretation.” This was in response to Gorsuch’s question regarding why the ban was issued by a federal agency rather than codified by Congress.
Prompting the court to consider whether Congress passed the relevant Prohibition-era statute for both the weapons in circulation at the time and “other kinds of devices that could be created in the future that would do the same thing,” Fletcher returned to the original argument shortly before arguments ended.
“It made sure these laws were in place and reinforced them because it was concerned about the safety of the public and our nation’s law enforcement officers in the face of weapons that allowed us to fire multiple rounds with the press of a button,” Fletcher explained. “The horrific shooting in Las Vegas made it crystal clear just what bump stocks can do.”
When the ban’s opponent, Michael Cargill, was questioned by Justice Samuel Alito about why lawmakers might outlaw machine guns but not bump stocks, Alito urged Cargill to explain.
People with disabilities, issues with dexterity of the fingers, or arthritis of the fingers can benefit from using bump stocks. Keeping these devices lawful could be an issue of policy, the attorney Jonathan Mitchell said.
As a rebuttal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor questioned Congress’s rationale for assuming that an arthritic person would “shoot 400 to 7 or 800 rounds of ammunition under any circumstance.”
You wouldn’t allow someone without arthritis to do it, so why would you let someone with arthritis do it? she inquired.
Is that three buttons? Do you have two triggers? Subjects covered include the technical
The standard stock of a semiautomatic rifle—the portion of the weapon that presses against the shoulder—is replaced with a bump stock. By simply keeping their trigger finger still, users can use the device to simulate automatic firing by utilising the recoil.
The forward pressure on the rifle by the shooter is also necessary for it to work. As the justices attempted to determine whether the gadgets are encompassed by the legislation prohibiting machine guns or not, many of the inquiries on Wednesday centred on their operation.
The term “machine gun” is defined in that statute, which dates back to the 1930s, as a firearm that can discharge several rounds with “a single function of the trigger.”
Kagan said of the ban’s opposing lawyer, “What would count as a What about a gun where the shooter has to press two triggers simultaneously to fire? Would that be considered a “single function of the trigger,” she wondered. If that were the case, she argued, then using a bump stock or pressing forward on the firearm would also be acceptable.
Ultimately, she emphasised, what matters is how the law is really written. Also, she said, employing one’s common sense was crucial.
Conservative justices Alito and Gorsuch prefer the term “good textualist,” which Kagan used to describe herself. There is no contradiction between textualism and common sense, you know. Like, you gotta use your common sense while reading a statute, you know?
Her explanation was as follows: “What the statute comprehends is a weapon that fires a multitude of shots with a single human action,” she explained. This might be a conventional machine gun, where the operator presses the trigger or a recoil-happy variant.
The idea that those two things ought to be handled differently is something she simply cannot fathom, she continued.
