On Bump Stocks, the Supreme Court Is Divorced From Reality
It's bad enough when textualism undermines sensible laws. But it’s truly horrendous when it undermines public safety and empowers murderers.
Kinda like a machine gun.
Photographer: George Frey/Getty ImagesEvery so often, a Supreme Court oral argument is so divorced from reality that even a seasoned court-watcher like myself finds it jaw-dropping. The court’s consideration of whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was right to define guns equipped with bump stocks as machine guns was exactly that shocking.
The justices spent almost the entire time debating the technical workings of bump stocks and the meaning of the words “function” and “trigger” in the federal law that bans machine guns. No one, justice or lawyer, bothered to mention the real-world consequence of permitting bump stocks: they let mass shooters turn their semiautomatic assault rifles into effectively automatic weapons that fire up to 800 rounds a minute.