The conservative wing of the U.S. Supreme Court stuck to the word “function” and decided that more Americans should die in mass shootings.
In striking down a 2018 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regulation banning bump stocks, which essentially turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns, the Court's six conservative justices not only prioritized their own ideological prejudices over rational policymaking, but also prioritized an arrogant and misplaced confidence in their own technical expertise over a federal agency's thoughtful efforts to prevent the brutal massacre of innocent people.
Does this ruling allow a crazed murderer to fire more than 1,000 rounds in 10 minutes? That's not our problem, said six conservatives. We know how guns work, and we've looked up the meaning of some words in the dictionary.
To understand how scathing this decision is, one has to look at the inoffensive language of Justice Clarence Thomas' majority opinion. Justice Thomas rambles on about gun mechanics as if the only issue was to prove that bump stocks do not make semi-automatic rifles just as lethal as machine guns. Liberals are often accused of being too ideological and technocratic. This is the judgment of a right-wing ideological technocrat who is completely indifferent to the consequences of an approach that is casually detached from reality.
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“A semi-automatic rifle equipped with a bump stock will not fire more than one round as a result of a single function of the trigger,” Thomas wrote. “With or without a bump stock, the shooter must release and reset the trigger between shots, and any rounds fired after the trigger is released and reset are the result of separate and distinct trigger functions. All the bump stock does is accelerate the rate of fire by causing these distinct functions.[s]”Triggers happen one after the other.”
Read that phrase again: “Everything a bump stock can do…”
Certainly, “all about bump stocks” only enables murderers to kill more people more efficiently. Machine guns were banned because they were so lethal. The ATF's bump stock restrictions were born out of experience with mass shootings where their lethality was proven. But experience doesn't matter to well-protected judges.
Thomas boasted citations on the meaning of “function” from the Oxford English Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary and Webster's New International Dictionary, reinforcing the impression that the court viewed this as little more than parlor-room discourse.
The opening sentence of Justice Sonia Sotomayor's powerful dissent highlighted the clash between drawing room and real life: “On October 1, 2017, a gunman opened fire from a hotel room overlooking an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the deadliest mass shooting in American history. Using hundreds of rounds of ammunition in just a few minutes, he killed 58 people and injured more than 500. He did so using a commonly available semi-automatic rifle fitted with a bump stock.”
She then quickly described the result of conservatives’ strange dogmatism: “Today, the Supreme Court is returning bump stocks to civilian hands.” Writing for Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor also referenced the dictionary, but more importantly, what Congress intended when it banned machine guns in the first place. In the process, she offered a far more compelling explanation of what bump stocks do.
“Congress's definition of 'machine gun' rightly includes bump stocks as well as M-16s,” she wrote. “Today's decision to reject this common understanding will have deadly consequences.” Justice Sotomayor concluded by drawing the Court back from the cloud of theory and back to the atrocities cited at the beginning. “The majority's artificially narrow definition hampers government efforts to protect machine guns from shooters like the Las Vegas shooter,” she wrote. And that's it.
Defenders of the Supreme Court majority will argue that Congress could clarify the law by directly banning bump stocks, and of course it should do so now. But will conservatives in Congress hell-bent on worshiping Donald Trump want to reinstate a policy enacted by his administration? I'm skeptical.
But consider what it means for this majority to be to the right of the former president (or at least to the right of Trump in 2017), with the support of three of Trump's appointees. Either way, no congressional action should be necessary, and the decision will be a reminder of just how warped and extreme conservative gun jurisprudence has become.
Mass shootings bring inevitable suffering to our country and should make us feel ashamed. But the Supreme Court majority is not ashamed. They prefer to flip through the dictionary, pretend their justices have advanced engineering degrees, and arrogantly snub even the most modest and pragmatic regulatory efforts to stop murder. And all the while, they will escape accountability the next time a mass shooter puts a bump stock on his gun and starts firing.
