While those involved in the gun industry (including some firearm fans and most regulators) were familiar with bump stocks, bump stocks did not enter the average person’s knowledge until they were used to help a gunman convert his semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun to kill multiple people at a concert in Las Vegas. A bump stock is a part that uses the recoil of the gun to fire multiple shots without requiring further pulls on the trigger.
Federal law bans the ownership of machine guns. The “definitions” part of this law defines a machine gun as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger. The term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in the possession or under the control of a person.”
Prior to the Las Vegas mass shooting, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms took the position that a bump stock did not meet this definition. After the shooting, to head off pressure to amend the law to clearly cover bump stocks, the Donald Trump ATF issued regulatory guidance that a bump stock did meet this definition — namely that it was a part intended to use to convert a weapon so that it would “automatically [shoot] more than one shot . . . by a single function of the trigger.”
Plaintiff owned some bump stocks. After this regulation went into effect, he surrendered his bump stocks to the ATF but filed this case seeking a declaration that the regulation was wrong and invalid.
On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court, issued an opinion in Garland v. Cargill which ruled in favor o f the plaintiff. The Supreme Court, in an opinion written by Justice Thomas , split along the traditional 6-3 liberal-conservative divide. There are a lot of influences that go into this decision.
In the background, there is, of course, the Second Amendment considerations. While even the most conservative justices appear to concede that the government can ban what most people would characterize as machine guns, some of the justices — including Justice Thomas — are probably uncomfortable with a broader definition of machine guns.
There is also the discomfort with the administrative state. As noted over the weekend, there are two cases still awaiting a decision involving the deference which courts should give to administrative agencies in interpreting statutes. This reluctance to defer to an administrative agency’s interpretation of a law increases when that agency is changing its interpretation in response to political pressure. This Court, as reflected in Justice Alito’s concurrence, thinks that, if the political branches want to change the law, the proper way to do this is by a new statute (which this regulation eliminated the pressure to pass) rather than by a new regulation.
Finally, there are the rules of statutory interpretation. Normally, when a criminal law or tax law (and this definition applies to both the tax code and the criminal code) is unclear, the default “tie-breaker” is to interpret the law narrowly in favor of the defendant/taxpayer and against the government. In defining bump stocks as fitting within the definition but not other questionable weapons, the ATF was drawing some fine lines which, at least, the conservative majority found to be inconsistent.
The dissent in this case was approximately the same length as the majority opinion (eighteen pages for the dissent compared to nineteen pages for the majority opinion which included some diagrams and schematics). The dissent contends that the majority ignores the intent behind the definition. The basic dispute is whether single function of the trigger refers to a single act by the shooter or what is happening with the trigger. As a bump stock essentially reengages the trigger without any further act by the shooter, it is not a machine gun if the definition is concerned with the trigger, but it is a machine gun if the focus is on the acts by the shooter. The two sides also disagree about the significance that a bump stock only fires multiple shots if the shooter maintains pressure on the front of the gun. Because an automatic machine gun only fires automatically if the shooter maintains pressure on the trigger, the dissent contends that the distinction drawn by the majority between classic machine guns and bump stocks is simply not accurate.
The result of this decision is to put the issue back on Congress’s plate. While it is possible that Congress might have acted back in 2017 and 2018 if the Trump ATF had not used this regulation to minimize any potential change, it will be much harder to get a new statute passed today. Which, of course, is what the gun lobby wanted. This decision also bodes poorly for a case on next term’s docket involving regulations of ghost guns.
