Six Republican justices handed down a decision Friday that effectively legalizes civilian ownership of automatic weapons. All three of the court’s Democrats dissented.
According to the court’s decision Mala vs. Kargil Involves bump stocks, devices that allow common semi-automatic weapons to legally fire automatically at civilians, much like machine guns designed for that purpose. Bump stocks cause the trigger of a semi-automatic gun to rest against the shooter’s finger, repeatedly “bumping” the trigger and causing the gun to fire rapidly.
A semi-automatic weapon refers to a gun that loads a bullet into the chamber or otherwise prepares itself to fire again after discharging a bullet, but will not fire a second shot until the shooter pulls the trigger a second time. In contrast, an automatic weapon will fire a continuous shot.
In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that the Trump administration decided to ban bump stocks after a shooter opened fire at a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017. Within minutes 58 people were killed and over 500 injured. The shooter used a bump stock to kill so many people so quickly.
A 1986 Act Makes it a crime to possess a “machine gun”. And the Trump administration has determined that the law is broad enough to include bump stocks. That law defines a “machine gun” as “any weapon that fires, is designed to fire, or can be easily reloaded to fire multiple shots automatically without manual reloading by a single function of the trigger.”
This law, justification, is rather vague. And lower courts are split on whether it can be read as the Trump administration reads it.
Some courts have concluded that the phrase “single function of trigger” should read, as one of those courts stated, “A single pull of the trigger from the shooter’s perspective” Thus, a semi-automatic weapon equipped with a bump stock counts as a machine gun because “the shooter engages in a single pull of the trigger with his trigger finger and that action, through the operation of the bump stock, produces a continuous stream of fire. As long as he keeps his finger still and doesn’t let go.”
Writing for the court’s Democratic minority, Sotomayor adopted the law’s reading. In his words, “A machine gun does not fire by itself. The important question under the statute is: How can a person set it on fire?“
Other reasonable readings of the statute focus on whether the trigger itself moves back and forth as each bullet is fired. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for Republicans on the Court takes this viewArguing that “what a bump stock does is speed up the rate of fire by causing this distinct ‘function.[s]Triggers to occur in rapid succession.
Both of these findings may be supported by competition rules regarding how guidelines should be interpreted.
Although Thomas did not rely on this rule in his opinion, some lower courts have applied the “rule of leniency” to justify rulings in favor of bump stocks. Generally, this rule establishes that when a criminal statute is ambiguous, the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of the defendant.
Alternatively, a rule known as the “presumption against invalidity” cuts the other way. As the Supreme Court has said Emily and Caroline (1824), courts should avoid reading statutes in a manner that “nullifies the statute to a great extent and enables criminals to evade its provisions in the easiest way.” (“Nugatory” means that the law is inactive or incapable of operation.)
Sotomayor argues in his opinion that this presumption against invalidity favors his reading of the law, because Thomas’ reading would effectively repeal the ban on machine guns. As he writes, “Anyone firing a bump-stock-equipped AR-15 can fire between 400 and 800 rounds per minute with a single pull of the trigger.”
So who is right here? The honest answer is that both possible readings of the statute are equally permissible, which explains why the lower courts are divided What was the verdict of the court? Kargil reveals that not every statutory interpretation question has a clear answer and that judges can often choose their preferred outcome.
And so six Republicans — members of a political party that generally supports gun rights, despite the Trump administration’s actions on bump stocks — chose an outcome consistent with their party’s pro-gun stance. Justices who belong to the Democratic Party, meanwhile, have chosen outcomes consistent with their party’s position on guns.
