Posted on 06/14/2024 9:49:13 AM PDT by RandFan
Justice Samuel Alito on Friday asserted that Congress could amend the law to successfully ban bump stocks in an opinion concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision Friday to invalidate a Trump-era ban on the devices.
The ban on bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire hundreds of rounds per minute, was implemented by the Trump administration in the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, where a shooter used a bump stock to kill a total of 60 people and wound hundreds of others — the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
The Biden administration later defended the regulation, which was challenged in 2019, before the high court. Both administrations made possessing the devices a criminal offense by newly classifying them as machine guns under long-standing federal law.
Alito, in his opinion, wrote that he agreed the ban should be lifted “because there is simply no other way to read the statutory language.” However, he acknowledged that the Congress that passed the law banning machine guns in 1934 would not have seen “any material difference” between a machine gun and a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock.
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
A folding stock is what stabilizes the a gun that could (according to BATF) transform a handgun into an SBR.
A bump stock is a device that utilizes the recoil from firing to chamber and fire a successive round. The “bump” is the trigger against the finger.
A couple of notes about the article. Claiming a bump stock enabled weapon can fire hundreds of rounds per minute is misleading because to do so you would have to have a magazine that holds hundreds of rounds. It should say if can increase the rate of fire of a weapon.
Second, because of the mechanics of a bump stock, the accuracy of the shooter will be significantly lower with a bump stock enabled weapon.
Think you might be confusing pistol brace with bump stocks.
I understand.
Still, I have a problem with a Conservative Justice casually suggesting that if anyone wants to infringe on the right to keep and bear arms, the best way to do so would be to have Congress pass some laws.
That sort of advice is not what we need.
You say so but the US Constitution says “no infringement”
you’re so wrong, Alito.
you’ wrong.
and by making a patently false statement you breed even more public contempt for the court than already exists.
how about going home and playing with your Lone Ranger cap gun for awhile?
You don't understand how SCOTUS works. They don't/can't rule on matters not argued before them. If they could, they'd be able to go free-lance and shop for issues to decide.
They couldn't make a ruling impacting 2A (or the Constitution in general) because this wasn't presented as a 2A issue. Read the court's ruling and you'll find the word "amendment" does not appear in it. Not even once.
https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2024/06/Supreme-Court-Bump-Stock-Opinion.pdf
Nor does the word "right" or "rights" (as in human rights or Constitutionally-enumerated rights) appear in the ruling.
And there's a reason for that. If you can get the judgement you want without exposing 2A/RKBA to a reversal, that is the prudent course. Because SCOTUS is always a crap shoot. Juries are notoriously fickle and SCOTUS is perhaps the ficklest jury of all. Don't forget that Heller decision vote was 5-4. A single vote and that battle would have been lost for decades. The Bruen vote was 6-3, which leaves a bit of breathing room, but that three justices voted against Bruen shows that even SCOTUS is plagued with judicial activists who value political ideology over the letter of the law.
So if you can get the relief you're after without exposing 2A to a reversal in SCOTUS, that would be the smart thing to do. This was argued as administrative overreach and violations of the Administrative Procedure Act. And it was successful. Trump's idiotic ban on bump-fire stocks is history. And they did it without exposing the 2nd Amendment to any reversal whatsoever.
“newly classifying them as machine guns under long-standing federal law.”
The same law can be applied to loading up more than one rubber band per finger “gun”?
"Alito: Congress can act on bump stocks after Supreme Court lifts Trump-era ban "
FR: Never Accept the Premise of Your Opponent’s Argument
Respectfully to the Supreme Court, although post-FDR era, institutionally indoctrinated, state sovereignty-ignoring Supreme Court justices supported the 2nd Amendment on this issue, they did so for the wrong reason imo.
Pro-2nd Amendment patriots need to consider the ramifications of the Constitution's Article IV, Section 4 (4.4). This clause requires the federal government to STAND DOWN to domestic violence unless a state formally requests assistance to help stop such violence.
"Article IV, Section 4: The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence [emphases added]."
Consider that if the states had given Congress the power to make peacetime restrictive gun laws to deal with domestic violence, then 4.4 would be meaningless as the federal government would arguably be able to enforce such laws without first waiting for a state to request assistance to deal with violence.
In fact, the congressional record shows that Rep. John Bingham, the main author of Section 1 of the 14th Amendment (14A), had clarified that that the states have never expressly constitutionally given the feds the peacetime power to deal with domestic violence, not even for murder!
Excerpted from 14A:
"Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States [emphasis added]; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
"Section 5: The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article."
"Our Constitution never conferred upon the Congress of the United States the power - sacred as life is, first as it is before all other rights which pertain to man on this side of the grave - to protect it in time of peace by the terrors of the penal code within organized states; and Congress has never attempted to do it. There never was a law upon the United States statute-book to punish the murderer for taking away in time of peace the life of the noblest, and the most unoffending, as well, of your citizens, within the limits of any State of the Union [emphases added]. The protection of the citizen in that respect was left to the respective States, and there the power is to-day.” —Rep. John Bingham, Congressional Globe. (See bottom half of third column.)
In fact, when Bingham read the Bill of Rights as main examples of constitutionally enumerated protections that 14A applies to the states, he included the 2nd Amendment.
“See 2nd Amendment (Article II) about middle of 2nd column.” — John Bingham, Appendix to the Congressional Globe
So Congress now has the 14th Amendment power to make peacetime gun laws. Oh-noes!
H O W E V E R ...
The 14th Amendment limits the gun-related laws that Congress makes to laws that STRENGTHEN 2A protections.
The challenge remains that Democratic and Republican Trump supporters need to support hopeful Trump 47 with a new, Constitution-respecting Congress in November, not only so that he won't be a lame duck president from the first day of his second term, but will also do its duty to strengthen constitutionally enumerated protections from abuse by the states.
WTF??? IF this ban was UNCONSTITUTIONAL, how can Congress ban them???
It still makes me sad that Slide Fire Solutions, the company that invented, manufactured, patented and sold what became (erroneously) known as the “bump-stock” was driven out of business by Trump45’s wrong-headedness.
I hope this decision gives them the standing to sue the peanutbutter out of the gummint for wrongfully depriving them of the right to engage in lawful commerce.
.
“Why say this...”
Because it’s true. The SC decision was that ATF had misinterpreted the definition of Machine Gun in the National Firearms Act.
This is a duh. Congress could rewrite the definition to include bump-stocks. Then it would become a constitutional issue. As of now, it’s merely an issue of statutory interpretation.
“Think Roe. As it was, it took 50 years to strike, because it wasn’t really presented properly.”
That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that a majority of the court was only interested in the policy question of whether women should be able to kill their babies. The majority thought that was a great idea.
Until recently, the majority was utterly uninterested in the obvious constitutional defects of Roe and PPH v Casey.
When you can’t afford the F-16’s your president recommends....
“So even Alito ignores the 2nd amendment.”
As an aside, I think that even IF Congress decided to pass a law banning bump stocks or making them subject to NFA registration (and there are a whole host of issues there), that would also end up being unconstitutional. Why? Because there are more than 200,000 bump stocks in public hands (and, I can guarantee, there will be a lot more sold before Congress even takes up the issue, IF it decides to do so). 200,000 is an important threshold, because an “arm” is protected under the 2nd Amendment unless it is BOTH dangerous AND unusual - and 200,000 was decided upon as being the threshold (so far) for when an “arm” is no longer “unusual.” This is the Caetano v. Massachusetts case from 2016 involving a stun gun - Caetano won, because there were more an estimated 200,000 in circulation at the time the case was brought. No one has since tested a lower number
The communists at The Hill believe in rainbow unicorns.
“Yeah? And who are they who answer to the citizens of the USA?”
The politicians answer to the people. Please don’t tell me you come home upset with a bureaucrat or government employee and do not call your elected official to raise the issue? If you do, no wonder.
The politicians answer to the people
Really? The do? First I’ve heard of it.
What do politicians, lawyers, and judges not understand about the simple English phrase “shall not be infringed?”
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