Editor's note: Dominic Erdozain is a historian and author of “One Nation Under Guns.” Follow him on X. translatorThe opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. See more opinions on CNN.
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When machine guns became available to civilians in the United States in the 1920s, the public reaction was swift and intense. Journalist Owen P. White protested in 1926 that the existence of such weapons was “the greatest specimen of barbarism in peacetime.” The Thompson machine gun was light and extremely lethal, making it the perfect tool for killing civilians. He added that there was something “diabolical” about the invention, much less the availability, of such an object. In 1934, the notorious “Tommy” gun was banned by Congress, and automatic rifle fire disappeared from American streets.
Courtesy of Dominic Erdzain
Dominic Erdzayn
In 2013, a company called Slide Fire Solutions introduced a device called the “bump stock,” which allows semi-automatic assault rifles to operate like fully automatics, casually circumventing the machine gun ban. “It sprays like a fire hose,” announced Slide Fire's sales and marketing manager, Brandon Renner. “We recommend no more than 30 rounds on your belt, but you can go as big as you like with one person,” he advised.
Four years later, in October 2017, retired accountant Stephen Paddock used that very gun to open fire on concertgoers in Las Vegas, killing 58 and wounding nearly 500. The massacre was the worst in U.S. history, and was carried out by one man with legally acquired equipment. Then-President Donald Trump called for prohibition, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) revised regulations to include bump stocks in the category of machine guns. It was a rare moment of progress in the fierce gun debate, and everyone lamented, “enough is enough.” Slide Fire Solutions stopped making them, and even the most pessimistic about the gun crisis would agree that there are limits. Or maybe not.
On Friday, the Supreme Court displayed smoldering defiance and perplexing logic when it overturned a Trump-era federal bump stock ban, accusing the ATF of “abruptly” reversing its own standards. Justice Clarence Thomas, with the solicitude of a parent protecting his child, strictly and technically interpreted the term “machine gun,” rightly exempting bump stocks from its greedy grip. Americans should be alarmed by this decision and the twisting of language that led to it. The Court is taking us backwards.
The ruling in Garland v. Cargill holds that the ATF does not have the authority to ban the sale of bump stocks because they are not machine guns under the National Firearms Act of 1934, which defines a machine gun as a weapon that can automatically fire one or more shots without manual reloading “with a single actuation of the trigger.” That phrase, which appears more than 30 times in the ruling, is at the heart of Thomas' argument, as he defends the court's decision to legalize the deadly devices.
Thomas agrees. Bump stocks allow assault rifles to fire bullets at frightening rates of hundreds of rounds per minute. But while bump stocks simulate the action of a machine gun, they still require the trigger to be compressed and released — but at a very high rate and with the force of the weapon's recoil. So they don't fit the technical definition of a machine gun that fires with a “single” flick of the trigger. Here we get into a forest of semantics.
Thomas acknowledges that applying continuous pressure to the bump stock makes the gun appear to fire continuously at high speed. But this is not automatic fire, he argues, but only the sensation and illusion of automatic fire, because the trigger still has to move back and forth. Bump stocks make this possible, turning the average shooter into a virtuoso with lightning-fast fingers. But these are all external. This is a completely harmless assault rifle operation; it does not change its essence. By Thomas' reasoning, the user may only have the sensation that he is operating a machine gun, but the speed comes from a part of the weapon not called the “trigger,” so a court cannot recognize it as a machine gun. That's it.
The case is bolstered by citations from the Oxford English Dictionary and the American Heritage Dictionary, which defines a trigger as “a lever that is pressed by the finger to fire a gun.” But none of that would have made much sense to a music festival crowd in Las Vegas in 2017.
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This is the path we have arrived at: a literal interpretation that proudly ignores the meaning and intent of the law. At oral argument, Justice Thomas acknowledged that the initial move to ban machine guns was prompted by the carnage they cause and, in his words, “people dying and so on.” But none of this can be allowed to infringe on the sacred domain of the provision as he wants to interpret it. Much more persuasive is Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s straightforward reasoning: “A semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is a machine gun because a single pull of the trigger allows the shooter to fire successive shots without any human intervention other than maintaining forward pressure.”
The ability of the Court to provoke arguments from dissenting voices is nothing new.
This is the same technique used in the landmark 2008 decision, District of Columbia v. Heller, which turned a state militia's right to bear arms into the right to own a gun for self-defense. Once again, it was the dictionary and the assumed logic of words that defined meaning, not history itself. In this paradigm, nothing is safe. Neither are we.
There is something reckless about a Supreme Court that can drag words and change language to kill gun laws. There are many reasons to consider reforming the higher courts, and this decision should be the most important one.
