“An event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning.”

—-Justice Joseph Alito, concurring in the case of Garland v. Cargill and re-affirming the ethical, legal, democratic and conservative principle that laws shouldn’t be ignored or changed by courts just because they no longer work the way they were designed to.

I guess this will be just one more reason for the Angry Left to try to “get” Alito. Maybe he likes to eat candy bars that a lot of the Capitol rioters ate, or something. May be they’ll hire a lip-reader to try to catch him saying something like “it was a riot!” while smiling. Conflict of interest! Recuse!

Re-affirming why the 6-3 conservative SCOTUS majority is good for democracy, the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday ruled that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (aka the ATF) exceeded its statutory authority when it tried to ban bump stocks by classifying them as machineguns. Machineguns are defined in an old statute, the National Firearms Act of 1934. It banned “machine guns,” encompassing today’s automatic weapons. The law “defines a machinegun as any weapon capable of firing “automatically more than one shot…by a single function of the trigger,” as Justice Clarence Thomas explained in the majority opinion. Although the definition also covers parts of a gun that are “designed and intended…for use in converting a weapon” into a machinegun, it does not cover “bump stocks.”

Bump stocks assist “bump firing,” which involves pushing a rifle forward to activate the trigger by bumping it against a steady finger, then allowing recoil energy to push the gun backwards, resetting the trigger. If the shooter maintains forward pressure and keeps the trigger finger in place, a semi-automatic rifle will fire like an automatic weapon (anti-gun fanatics don’t know the difference, and don’t care). The ATF’s “interpretive rule” published in December of 2018 banned stock replacements that facilitated this operation.

But as Thomas meticulously explained, bump firing “requires more than a single function of the trigger. A shooter must also actively maintain just the right amount of forward pressure on the rifle’s front grip with his nontrigger hand. Too much forward pressure and the rifle will not slide back far enough to release and reset the trigger, preventing the rifle from firing
another shot. Too little pressure and the trigger will not bump the shooter’s trigger finger with sufficient force to fire another shot. Without this ongoing manual input, a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock will not fire multiple shots.”

“We hold that a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a ‘machinegun’ because it cannot fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,'” Thomas wrote. And “even if it could, it would not do so ‘automatically.’ ATF therefore exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies bump stocks as machine guns…[The statute] does not define a machinegun based on what type of human input engages the trigger—whether it be a pull, bump, or something else,” Thomas continued. “Nor does it define a machinegun based on whether the shooter has assistance engaging the trigger. The statutory definition instead hinges on how many shots discharge when the shooter engages the trigger.”

“Technicality!,” the Court’s critics and gun-phobics will scream. Yes, laws are technical, and words matter. This was a bureaucratic attempt to impose new gun controls without Congressional approval, a “Do something!” response after the bloody Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017 showed how a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock could mow down victims like a “machine gun.”

The ATF’s kind of “oh, details, details!” approach to getting around laws is a deadly slippery slope that the totalitarian-leaning Left particularly admires lately. We have seen, especially in the past three administrations, repeated efforts to end-around the law of the land when legislative gridlock makes amending or replacing existing laws unlikely. The anti-gun lobby makes such maneuvers especially attractive in that area. Yesterday, as the SCOTUS decision came down, a federal judge in Texas vacated another ATF rule that redefined pistols with braces as “short-barreled rifles” under the National Firearms Act. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor described the rule as “unlawful” and “illegitimate.”

Indeed, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Ca.) admitted that the ATF was exceeding its power by banning bump stocks, stating that “legislation is the only answer…the law has not changed.” Feinstein described the ATF’s move as based on “a dubious analysis claiming that bumping the trigger is not the same as pulling it.”

Progressives hate these kinds of SCOTUS rulings, because it’s so much easier to just have a woke agency change a law rather than have to go through the laborious process of passing a new or better one. One example that is still misrepresented in the news media was when the Court declared that a portion of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional because it was based on the discriminatory policies of particular states at the time the legislation was passed, yet still permitted the current Federal government to block those states’ laws decades after their culture had changed. “Update the law,” the Court told Congress. “We can’t agree!” said the legislature. “Not our problem!” replied the Court.

“There can be little doubt that the Congress that enacted [this law] would not have seen any material difference between a machine gun and a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock,” Alito wrote in his concurring opinion. “But the statutory text is clear, and we must follow it… There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machine guns. Congress can amend the law…Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”

Exactly.

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Source: Reason