Giffords Flak Claims SCOTUS 'Essentially Legalized Machine Guns' With Bump Stock Decision

Giffords Flak Claims SCOTUS 'Essentially Legalized Machine Guns' With Bump Stock
Decision

Cam Edwards

While the Supreme Court has struck down the ATF's ban on bump stocks, it didn't
implicate the Second Amendment in its decision. Instead, the Court ruled that
the ATF impermissibly banned the non-mechanical devices through a gross
misreading of the federal statute that defines machine guns as firearms that
discharge multiple rounds through a single function of the trigger. Today's
decision does not change the fact that full-auto firearms are restricted under
the National Firearms Act, nor does it repeal the Hughes Amendment prohibiting
the purchase of any machine gun manufactured after 1987.

Justice Samuel Alito went so far as to explicitly state in his concurrence that
if Congress wants to ban bump stocks it can do so. All the Supreme Court said is
that the ATF alone can't ban the devices, at least not by claiming that they
turn semi-automatic firearms into machine guns.

Naturally, the gun control lobby is already lying about what Justice Clarence
Thomas and the majority held in Cargill v. Garland.

    WATCH: Our Executive Director @Emma_S_Brown joined @MSNBC to respond to
    SCOTUS's dangerous decision to strike down the ban on bump stocks.

    "The Supreme Court has essentially legalized machine guns in this country.
    And if that sounds unbelievable, it's because it is."
    pic.twitter.com/EgCw9DQxBa

  - GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) June 14, 2024

That's right. It is unbelievable, as in "it should not be believed."

"A bump stock is a device that converts a semi-automatic rifle, where you have
to pull the trigger each time you want to fire, into a rifle where you can just
hold down the trigger and you can fire 400 to 800 rounds per minute," Brown
erroneously claimed on MSNBC without any pushback or correction from the
network's anchors.

As SCOTUS explained in Cargill, simply attaching a bump stock to a
semi-automatic rifle doesn't increase the rate of fire at all. It doesn't change
the function of the trigger in any way. Even when a bump stock is affixed to a
semi-automatic rifle, only one round is discharged with a single pull of the
trigger. And the Court went out of its way to state that actual machine guns are
still regulated under the provisions of the NFA.

    Interpreting �5845(b) to exclude semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump
    stocks comes nowhere close to making it useless. Under our reading, �5845(b)
    still regulates all traditional machineguns. The fact that it does not
    capture other weapons capable of a high rate of fire plainly does not render
    the law useless. Moreover, it is difficult to understand how ATF can
    plausibly argue otherwise, given that its consistent position for almost a
    decade in numerous separate decisions was that �5845(b) does not capture
    semiautomatic rifles equipped with bump stocks.

Brown is just blatantly lying when she says the Supreme Court "essentially
legalized machine guns" today. As much as I'd love to see SCOTUS strike down the
NFA in its entirety, I don't think there are five justices on the Court right
now who are ready and willing to take that step.

The gun control lobby isn't interested in educating or informing voters about
what today's decision really means; the ATF overstepped its bounds and created a
new law, which is the job of Congress, not an executive branch agency. Their
goal is to scare the American public into thinking that machine guns are going
to start popping up on gun store shelves, which they believe will help their
push for a ban on Capitol Hill. With media outlets like MSNBC happy to amplify
the misinformation, Brown's claim may very well find traction with voters, but
it doesn't change the fact that her statement is pure fiction.

https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2024/06/14/giffords-flak-claims-scotus-essentially-legalized-machine-guns-with-bump-stock-decision-n1225279