Father’s Day 2024 took on a darker tone for me this year because of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ ban on bump stocks. The decision came the same week that Newtown, Connecticut, celebrated its high school graduation and remembered 20 students and those who would have graduated from the Class of 2024 had they not been killed in a classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, along with six faculty members. And the Supreme Court decision came on the same day that officials began demolition of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where 14 students and three faculty members were killed in a mass shooting in 2018.
I spent this Father's Day grieving for the fathers (and mothers, brothers and sisters) who have lost children, and those who will lose sons and daughters in the future. They deserve more than just “thoughts and prayers.” It is especially tragic that meaningful action to protect Americans from mass shootings seems to be blocked at every turn by political leaders and Supreme Court justices who reject even modest efforts by the executive branch.
The Supreme Court's 6-3 decision to strike down the federal bump stock ban enacted by the Trump Administration in the wake of the worst mass shooting in U.S. history unfortunately reveals that the Court is out of touch with reality.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. acknowledged that the 2017 Las Vegas massacre “demonstrated that semi-automatic rifles equipped with bump stocks have the same lethal power as machine guns” and called for a “necessity” to ban bump stocks, but agreed with Justice Clarence Thomas that such guns are not machine guns because they require “forward pressure” to continue firing.
Twelve years in the military taught me that what matters is whether a gun can kill someone, not whether a repeating gun meets the ridiculously technical definition of a machine gun. To paraphrase Justice Sonia Sotomayor's dissenting opinion, if I see a gun that fires like a machine gun, recoils like a machine gun, and can kill like a machine gun, I would call it a machine gun.
Alan Kennedy, Williamsburg, Virginia
Needless to say, time to think.
The Post puts the rate of fire for bump stocks at 400-800 rounds per minute, which works out to 0.075-0.15 seconds per bullet. That's much faster than the human reaction time to brake a car. The University of Idaho says it takes 90% of the population up to 2.5 seconds. Presumably, pulling the trigger once per bullet is to ensure that the person using the gun has at least a human reaction time to think through what they're doing. With bump stocks, you have discretion when firing the first shot. But what about subsequent shots?
Zachary Levine, Rockville
Safe for me, but not for you
I was struck by the final sentence of EJ Dionne Jr.'s June 15 op-ed about the Supreme Court's decision overturning a federal ban on semi-automatic rifles equipped with bump stocks. His statement that “the next time a mass murderer puts a bump stock on his gun and starts firing, judges will not be held accountable” reminded me of my reaction after the Supreme Court ruled in 2022 that “the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms.” [concealed] Handguns can be used “for self-defense outside the home,” but not in “sensitive places where weapons are totally prohibited, such as parliaments, polling stations and courts.”
This means that bump-stocked handguns and rifles are permitted on the streets, but not in the courts where judges make and publish their decisions. Judges are not just “protected from accountability” — they are protected from the very threat they unleash on us all.
The Supreme Court's decision striking down the federal ban on bump stock devices represents an opportunity for advocates of gun safety legislation that most Americans support.
The Post reported that Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh suggested during oral argument that “Congress needs to explicitly prohibit these devices, rather than relying on a ban on machine guns,” a view emphasized by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in a concurring opinion.
Lawmakers and candidates at all levels should seize this opportunity to loudly advertise and campaign enthusiastically on their intentions to address gun violence. As The Washington Post noted, voters of all ages are tired of “praying and praying,” especially considering that there were 39 mass shootings in the United States last year, the most since 2006. We are hopeful that the Gun Violence Prevention Act will be the solution. We are ready to elect lawmakers who will act courageously on this issue, and we will replace those who have not or will not act.
EJ Dionne Jr.'s column criticizing the Supreme Court's decision on bump stocks misunderstands the role of the courts. He seems to think that the court's job in this case was to decide whether bump stocks are a good thing. This is wrong. The court was dealing with a law banning machine guns. The issue the court was considering was whether the ATF was correct in finding that bump stocks turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns within the meaning of the law. The court's job is to determine whether a congressional or executive branch decision is lawful; it is not to set gun control policy. Personally, I would have thought that the ATF decision was reasonable and should have been upheld based on Supreme Court precedent that executive branch actions should be upheld unless unreasonable.
Don't blame the dictionary
E.J. Dionne Jr.’s condemnation of the Supreme Court’s decision in Garland v. Cargill encapsulates what many of us perceive as the Court’s indifference to the potentially deadly consequences of its decision to strike down bump stock restrictions.
But no one believes the conservative justices' argument that the dictionary led them to do so. Not only did the majority ignore the potential consequences of their decision, it also ignored what the text and history of the law passed by Congress requires.
As my organization, the Constitutional Accountability Center, explained in an amicus brief in this case, the key terms in the current statutory definition of “machine gun” — “automatically” and “with a single pull of the trigger” — were codified into law in 1934. In the lexicon then, as in our understanding today, these terms clearly encompassed weapons that could continue to fire after the shooter initially pulled the trigger. Bump stocks create exactly that cycle.
The history of the National Firearms Act bears out what that provision makes clear: Congress defined a “machine gun” to apply to any gun that fires multiple shots after the shooter pulls the trigger the first time, precisely because it was trying to end a dangerous circumvention of the machine gun ban that is exploited today by bump stock manufacturers.
Dion correctly described this case as an example of the Court's “warped, radical conservative jurisprudence,” but even worse, the Court's majority did not follow its professed method of statutory interpretation in reaching its conclusion. In other words, the Court's pretense of “literalism” does not stand up to scrutiny. The bump stock ban did not fail because the majority considered only the dictionary and not the consequences. The bump stock ban failed because the majority followed only its own ideological preferences, not the actual requirements of the dictionary.
The author is an advisor to the Constitutional Accountability Center.
Or hiding behind technology
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in his opinion on the permissibility of bump stocks, argues that bump stocks are permissible because pulling the trigger once does not fire more than one shot. Justice Thomas cleverly states that what matters is only that the trigger mechanically returns after each shot, not whether that process is automatic from the shooter's point of view.
Instead of the shooter needing to pull the trigger once in a row, a bump stock fires repeatedly by momentarily removing his finger from the trigger after each shot and then returning it to prepare for the next shot. A bump stock involuntarily moves the shooter's trigger finger through a vibration feedback loop.
As a result, semi-automatic rifles can fire at the same speed as automatic rifles. Who cares if the trigger technically returns? Certainly not the victims of shooters or their families.
Dean Poirier, Lilburn, Georgia
