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A bump stock allows a semiautomatic weapon to mimic the rate of fire of an automatic weapon. That much should be clear to advocates of gun rights and gun control advocates alike. This was tragically demonstrated during the 2017 shooting at a concert in Las Vegas, the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history claiming 58 lives and wounding more than 850 in the crowd.
The administration of former President Donald Trump recognized this carnage, reassessed the government’s position and took action on bump stocks. That type of reflection and action is exactly what should happen when mass tragedy highlights a weakness in current laws, rules, institutions and enforcement.
Under Trump, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) determined that these devices fall under the definition of “machinegun” in federal law because they “allow a semiautomatic firearm to shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm to which it is affixed so that the trigger resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter.”
To us that was a reasonable interpretation of both the intent and meaning of longstanding U.S. laws restricting automatic weapons, and the functionality of bump stocks. These devices essentially act as a loophole to those federal laws, increasing the rate at which a semiautomatic weapon can be fired and the damage it can do in a short time.
By a margin of 6-3, the Supreme Court has disagreed with us and the ATF under both Trump and President Joe Biden. The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, features a tortured discussion about actual finger pulls of the trigger.
Words and definitions matter, perhaps no place more than the U.S. Supreme Court where rulings of seismic national importance can hinge on a single meaning or interpretation. However, this necessity should not allow a rigid ideological pursuit of textualism to crowd out any notion of practicality and pragmatism. The reality is that a bump stock transforms the functionality and lethality of a weapon. The ATF regulation, now unfortunately overturned, recognized that reality.
While we disagree with the court majority’s conclusion and the road justices took to get there, the ruling reflects an important truth: Congress has failed to act on this and many other issues. Lawmakers should be ensuring that federal law keeps up with the realities of today through legislative action, rather than allowing administrative action (under both Democratic and Republican presidents) to fill the void left from stagnation in Congress.
So rather than continue the tortured debate over the modern-day implications of finger pulling and decades-old law, Congress and state legislatures should pass updated legislation to clearly and unambiguously ban bump stocks through legislative rather than administrative action.
We are unlikely to find ourselves among Justice Samuel Alito’s fan club as of late. That aside, he is at least partially (and convincingly) right in his concurring opinion in the bump stock case that guns equipped with a bump stock can have the same lethality as a machine gun, potentially meriting an update to federal law.
“The horrible shooting spree in Las Vegas in 2017 did not change the statutory text or its meaning,” Alito wrote in his concurrence. “That event demonstrated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machinegun, and it thus strengthened the case for amending §5845(b). But an event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning.”
“There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns,” Alito continued. “Congress can amend the law — and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation. Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”
We have only one thing to quibble with in that final sentence: Congress should act. And the Maine Legislature, which passed its own bump stock ban but failed to overcome an April veto from Gov. Janet Mills, should revisit the issue as well. Mills stressed that her concerns were about “novel language” in the bill, and that she does “strongly agree” that devices meant to change semiautomatic weapons to the functional equivalent of a machine gun should be restricted. State lawmakers should address the concerns raised by Mills in the next legislative session, and find a workable path forward.
If Americans are being honest with ourselves about functionality, and not clinging to an ideologically convenient argument about trigger pulls, we should be able to recognize that these devices rapidly transform the lethality of a semiautomatic firearm. And we should be able to agree that bump stocks need to be definitively banned under both federal and state law.