Conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court have decided that more Americans must die in mass shootings because they have a quibble over the word “function.”
In striking down the 2018 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) regulation banning bump stocks, which effectively turn semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, the court’s six conservative justices not only put their ideological preconceptions ahead of rational policymaking. They also privileged an arrogant, misplaced confidence in their own technical expertise over a federal agency’s thoughtful effort to prevent the grotesque slaughter of innocents.
Will this ruling allow demented killers to fire more than 1,000 rounds in 10 minutes? Not our problem, said the six conservatives. We know how guns work, and we consulted several dictionaries about what words mean.
You have to look at the blandly technical language of Justice Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion to appreciate how bloodless this ruling is. Thomas goes on and on about gun mechanics, as if the only issue is establishing that bump stocks might not make semiautomatic rifles exactly as lethal as machine guns. Liberals are regularly accused of being too ideological and too technocratic. This is a ruling of right-wing ideological technocrats utterly indifferent to the consequences of an approach that blithely floats above reality.
“A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock does not fire more than one shot ‘by a single function of the trigger,’” Thomas writes. “With or without a bump stock, a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot. And, any subsequent shot fired after the trigger has been released and reset is the result of a separate and distinct ‘function of the trigger.’ All that a bump stock does is accelerate the rate of fire by causing these distinct ‘function[s]’ of the trigger to occur in rapid succession.”
Read that phrase again: “All that a bump stock does …”
Yes, “all that a bump stock does” is allow killers to shoot many more people much more efficiently. Machine guns were banned because they were so lethal. The ATF’s bump stock regulation grew out of the experiences of mass shootings, which have demonstrated their lethality. But experience does not matter to the well-protected justices.
Thomas added to the sense that the court sees this as little more than a disquisition in a drawing room, flaunting references to the Oxford English Dictionary, the American Heritage Dictionary and Webster’s New International Dictionary on the meaning of the word “function.”
The clash between the drawing room and real life was brought home by the first sentences of Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s powerful dissent: “On October 1, 2017, a shooter opened fire from a hotel room overlooking an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, Nevada, in what would become the deadliest mass shooting in U. S. history. Within a matter of minutes, using several hundred rounds of ammunition, the shooter killed 58 people and wounded over 500. He did so by affixing bump stocks to commonly available, semiautomatic rifles.”
She then moved quickly to the consequences of the conservatives’ bizarre dogmatism: “Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands.” Writing for herself and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sotomayor referred to the dictionary, too, but, more importantly, Congress’s intent when it banned machine guns in the first place. In the process, she offered a far more compelling account of what bump stocks do.
“Congress’s definition of ‘machinegun’ encompasses bump stocks just as naturally as M16s,” she wrote. “Today’s decision to reject that ordinary understanding will have deadly consequences.” Sotomayor concluded by bringing the court down from the clouds of theory and back to the brutalities she invoked at the outset. “The majority’s artificially narrow definition,” she wrote, “hamstrings the Government’s efforts to keep machineguns from gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.” It is as simple as that.
Defenders of the court majority will no doubt say that Congress can clarify the law by banning bump stocks directly, and of course that is what should happen now. But will congressional conservatives, who fall over themselves to venerate Donald Trump, be eager to restore a policy instituted by his administration? Call me skeptical.
It is, however, instructive to contemplate what it means for this majority — bolstered by three of Trump’s own nominees — to place itself to the former president’s right (or at least to the right of Trump in 2017). In any event, congressional action should not be necessary, and this decision will drive home just how distorted and radical conservative jurisprudence on guns has become.
Mass shootings bring avoidable suffering to our nation and ought to shame us. But this Supreme Court majority is not shamed. It prefers to page through dictionaries, pretend its members hold advanced engineering degrees and sniff superciliously at even the most modest and practical regulatory efforts to stop the killing. And all the while, it will be protected from accountability the next time a mass shooter affixes a bump stock to his weapon and starts firing.
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