So, the bump stocks were banned, and the law abiding citizens who owned bump stocks then complied with the ATF order to destroy the bump stocks. How do they get their loss of property resolved?
I don't imagine they will, there have been several cases now where bans have been repealed in similar fashion and no agency has been required to make any sort of restitution for those who complied.
I'll save you the trouble of reading the entire court opinion. It basically comes down to the legal definition of "function of the trigger".
The majority believes "function of the trigger" refers to the action of the gun itself - whether one movement of the trigger releases more than one bullet.
The minority argued that if you are exerting constant pressure backwards, that constitutes "a single function of the trigger" and if the gun does a bunch of bouncing around or trickery to turn that into multiple shots it becomes a machine gun.
Both arguments are pretty pedantic, but I am going to side with the majority on this one - as both sides point out, anyone is capable of bump firing guns or shooting rapidly without the aid of novelty devices. And the minority argument that any gun can be a machine gun if you fire it rapidly enough seems like a blank check for the legal system.
If congress wants to ban bump stocks, they need to actually pass a bill and not let the ATF rely on a loose legal interpretation.
>> The minority argued that if you are exerting constant pressure backwards
But that isn't how it works. The pressure on the trigger has to be varied for the gun to keep firing. She seems to think that keeping your finger in the same place constitutes "constant pressure" but that's simply not true. If there was constant backward pressure, then your finger would follow the trigger when it moves backwards in recoil. In that case, the bump system wouldn't work. To be fair I think she just genuinely doesn't understand this and the majority are partially to blame for overcomplicating it.
With a semi-automatic firearm, you must relieve the pressure/force on the trigger between shots and for that reason it cannot be "a single operation of the trigger". If this fits the definition of "single operation" then you'd only be allowed to fire a semi auto once. Firing it again the following year on your birthday would make it a machinegun.
It needs to be kept in mind that this ruling is not really about so-called “gun rights” but part of the Right’s concerted attack on the ability of the federal government to tie the hands of private actors in any capacity. The goal is to gum up the works such that any dispute over any interpretation of technical language must come before a panel of (ideally right-wing, FedSoc) judges, rather than the technical experts vested by Congress with the power to make such interpretations.
Of, if you actually read the opinion of the court in it's own words:
"There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns. 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."
No, they can't. The process was designed to obstruct laws being written. That was intended to protect minority interests, but it means that even large majorities cannot pass laws.
And when, after superhuman effort, a law does finally get passed, the Court has nearly unlimited ability to say "No, that's not good enough, either."
The argument is meant to suggest, "Well, all you need is a simple majority. If you can't get that then clearly this is the correct outcome".
Except that it's not a simple majority. You have to pass the House and the Senate, by a filibuster-proof margin, and the President. And that's without taking into account the ways gerrymandering and the way the Senate favors small states. So it's a deception to suggest that we don't get such a law because a majority doesn't want it.
So that opinion is a lie. The Congress can't act, and they know it. That doesn't make their decision wrong, but it does imply that they feel the need to misdirect about it.
The problem is the process you describe is the same for all laws, if that system doesn't work, fuck it, appoint a head of agency that has the current leaderships opinion to reinterpret the meaning of a policy, and change the policy without requiring the law making body to play any role in that.
If we set that sort of precedence, and the wrong people get appointed to say the department of health, or the department of education then suddenly what is legal and what isn't shifts quickly, and with no recourse.
I don't care about bump stocks, they can make them illegal tomorrow, but it should be done through the same legal channels that our government is based on. And not as a work around because they couldn't get it done in the framework that is agreed upon.
Given that their particular wording of their argument is actually what is going to be used by lower courts in the future, you literally take what they have written at face value.
+1 the OP hasn't offered anything resembling evidence for their position anyway. It's worth noting that 3 of the supreme court justices who voted to lift this ban were appointed by the president who ordered the ban. Is this an example of the famous "4D chess" we've been hearing about?
The ATF are far from "technical experts." Did you not see the recent video of the ATF's Firearms Ammunition Technology Division Chief was unable to disassemble a Glock pistol? That's like a 4 second operation.
It's not on that basis that it was overturned though. It was overturned because the definition of machinegun requires that it fires more than one round with a single operation of the trigger. Everyone knows bump stocks don't do that, thus they're not machineguns. The president just ordered the ATF to pretend that they were, that's all. States will probably still be able to ban them by legislation though.
"natural" rights no, Second Amendment rights provisionally.
And like... there are dozens of restrictive gun laws that rational people should advocate for. Concealed carry should not be available to just anyone; firearms should not be allowed on planes or long-distance public transit, background checks should be mandatory for Uncle Jack buying an anti-materiel rifle, and hunting licenses should continue to be mandatory to prevent overhunting.
Repeating this sort of non-nuanced position is how you get ignored in the grander scheme of gun control legislation
And like.. All of those "dozens of restrictive gun laws that rational people should advocate for" are also wildly unconstitutional and a complete violation of our natural rights. I'm not concerned with nuance or the narrow range of viewpoints on the issue that to which we are confined by individuals attempting to shape the narrative.
It appears that you seem ill equipped to participate in this conversation effectively if you are unable to discern that the 2A, as well as the other amendments in the bill of rights, are not the source of our rights. They are restrictions on the government that prevents it from interfering or infringing on our natural rights.
> All of those "dozens of restrictive gun laws that rational people should advocate for" are also wildly unconstitutional and a complete violation of our natural rights.
Okay. There are also laws that limit your speech on certain topics, but nobody is about to go defend the guy yelling "Fire!" in a movie theater. So natural infringement or not, there's not necessarily a demand to overturn all of these laws.
Naturally speaking you're entitled to a great number of things the law stops you from doing, because deterministic change is not inherently a good thing. We prevent unnatural and harmful actions by outlawing the most egregious violations of our right to self-determination. If you're unwilling to adopt a compromising approach to gun control then I'd argue you're ill-equipped to promote change in a liberal democracy.
> "...nobody is about to go defend the guy yelling "Fire!" in a movie theater."
"...But those who quote Holmes might want to actually read the case where the phrase originated before using it as their main defense. If they did, they'd realize it was never binding law, and the underlying case, U.S. v. Schenck, is not only one of the most odious free speech decisions in the Court's history, but was overturned over 40 years ago...."
