Posted on by Doug Santo

The net effect of the Democrats’ attempts to regulate guns out of existence is to cause guns of all types to become much more prevalent. Democrats’ lawfare backfires over and over…

U.S. Supreme Court Strikes Down Bump Stock Ban

“…On Friday the Supreme Court of the United States struck down the ATF’s ban on firearm accessories commonly known as bump stocks.

The decision was 6-3, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing the majority opinion.

Thomas wrote:

Semiautomatic firearms, which require shooters to reengage the trigger for every shot, are not machineguns. This case asks whether a bump stock—an accessory for a semi-automatic rifle that allows the shooter to rapidly reengage the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire)—converts the rifle into a ‘machinegun.’ We hold that it does not…”

“…Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in the New Civil Liberties Alliance case of Garland v. Cargill that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ unilateral bump-stock ban conflicts with the federal statute defining ‘machineguns.’ ATF’s regulatory ban, which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit shot down early last year, reversed the agency’s own long-standing recognition that bump-stock-equipped firearms are not machine guns. NCLA commends the high court for permanently setting ATF’s ban aside, safeguarding the rights of our client Michael Cargill and hundreds of thousands of other Americans to be free from laws written by executive branch bureaucrats instead of elected members of Congress…”

“…The guts of Thomas’s opinion are as follows:

Section 5845(b) defines a “machinegun” as any weapon capable of firing “automatically more than one shot . . . by a single function of the trigger.” 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.” 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 machineguns…”

“…Sotomayor’s dissent is predictably long on emotion and short on logic, dismissing Justice Thomas’ assessment of how the AR fire control groups works as a mere technicality. But she makes some interesting concessions in it. For one, she repeatedly notes that semiautomatic AR’s are not machineguns. While that seems obvious to the People of the Gun, it undercuts an argument that some in the gun-grabber community have been developing recently and putting forward: that because an AR (or a GLOCK) can be “readily” converted to automatic fire (e.g., by adding a drop-in auto sear or a GLOCK switch), they claim these guns can fall under the NFA definition of a machinegun. Sotomayor’s dissent seems to cut that argument off…”