Clarence Thomas legalizing bump stocks is indefensible.

The Supreme Court's vast conservative majority blew a huge loophole in the federal machine gun ban on Friday, striking down a ban on bump stocks first enacted in 2018 by the Trump administration. Its 6-3 decision allows civilians to convert AR-15-style rifles into automatic weapons that can fire at a rate of 400 to 800 rounds per minute. One would hope that a decision likely to inflict so much carnage would, at least, be unquestionably mandated by law. It's not. Far from it: To achieve this result, Justice Clarence Thomas's opinion for the Court tortures the statutory text beyond recognition, defying the clear and (so far) well-established orders of Congress. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor explained in her dissent, the vast majority flouts the “plain meaning” of the law, adopting an “artificially narrow” interpretation that will have “deadly consequences.” This Supreme Court will be squarely responsible for the next legal stock shooting.

Friday's decision, Garland v. Cargill, is not a Second Amendment matter. The plaintiffs do not (yet) argue that the Constitution guarantees the right to own wholesale inventory. Rather, they argue that the Trump administration pushed existing law too far by banning wholesale stocks following the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. The shooter committed that massacre using a gun, allowing him to murder 60 people in 10 minutes from 490 yards away, making it the deadliest mass shooting by a single shooter in U.S. history. To use this device, a shooter attaches it to their AR-15, then holds their finger on the trigger and leans forward to maintain pressure on the stock. A semi-automatic requires the shooter to squeeze the trigger to fire each shot. On the other hand, when done correctly, “mass shooting” can then unleash a shower of bullets without repeated presses of the trigger and at the pace of an automatic weapon. This barrage is audible in many videos of the Las Vegas shooting; victims were mowed down in rapid succession because the bump stock allowed continuous firing.

For years, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives monitored these devices; the agency has deemed some of them illegal, based on their precise mechanisms, but has not taken a formal position overall. The Las Vegas shooting prompted the ATF to conclude that the stocks turned semiautomatic rifles into machine guns, making them illegal under a longstanding federal law. Indeed, this law prohibits “any part designed and intended solely and exclusively” to “transform a weapon into a machine gun”. And a “machine gun” is defined as any firearm that fires “automatically” by “a single pull of the trigger.” After much deliberation, the ATF discovered that rifles equipped with bump stocks did just that.

The Supreme Court decided that it understood guns better than the ATF. Thomas' majority opinion reads like the feverish work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even a GIF. The judge, who worships at the altar of the gun, clearly appreciated the opportunity to describe the inner workings of these precious tools of slaughter. (Not surprisingly, he borrowed the images from the staunchly pro-gun Firearms Policy Foundation.) To achieve his preferred result, Thomas falsely accused the ATF of taking the “position” that replacement stocks were legal, then “abruptly” changed course after the decision. Filming in Las Vegas. This version is completely false: the ATF carefully examined, on a case-by-case basis, the various shock-stock-type devices as gun manufacturers developed them, deeming some permissible and others illegal. The gun industry pushed these devices onto the general public by misleading the ATF about their purpose; In one case, for example, a manufacturer gained agency approval by claiming that a humpback stock was designed to accommodate people with limited hand strength, then turned around and marketed it as the best thing after a machine gun.

After falsely accusing the agency of politically motivated flip-flopping – and using that accusation to downplay its expertise and authority – Thomas adopted a highly technical interpretation of the statute that does not fit its text. A “single function of the trigger,” he writes, does not mean a single function. to pull of the trigger, but rather a complete “cycle” of the spring-loaded hammer inside the gun. Because the hammer returns (quickly) to its original position between shots, Thomas concluded, “shock firing” involves more than “a single trigger function.” And because the shooter must “actively maintain” a particular position to exert pressure on certain parts of the weapon, the judge wrote, the resulting shot is not truly “automatic.”

Sotomayor's dissent, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, refutes this massacre of the text in a tone oscillating between scathing and sad. She pointed out that when Congress first banned “machine guns” in 1934, their “internal mechanisms” “varied wildly”: some used triggers, others used buttons; some relied on the shooter's rearward pressure on the weapon, while others exploited the recoil produced by the discharge of a bullet. “To account for these differences,” Sotomayor wrote, “Congress adopted a definition” that encompassed all weapons that fire continuously without the shooter needing to re-engage the trigger. Until Friday, this was the ordinary meaning of “automatic” fire. Numerous debates in Congress surrounding the 1934 bill confirm beyond doubt that lawmakers intended to codify this definition. And “evidence from contemporary use also largely supports this interpretation.”

Yet the Supreme Court has now replaced this nearly century-old interpretation with a narrow and highly technical interpretation that has no basis in statutory text. In doing so, Sotomayor noted, the majority “assumes the political role of Congress.” His indefensible decision “eviscerates Congress's regulation of machine guns,” “allows gun users and manufacturers to circumvent federal law,” and “cripples government efforts to keep machine guns available to gunmen like the Las Vegas shooter.

And why? Yes, a deep undercurrent of gun fetishism runs through Thomas's opinion. But so is arrogant skepticism of federal agencies like the ATF and the experts who employ them. The majority slyly rejects the ATF's interpretation in favor of its own amateurish conception of how a real machine gun works. In doing so, it seriously undermines American democracy, disobeying a congressional mandate and overturn a decision of the executive branch which, unlike the judiciary, is responsible to the people.

Yes, Congress can go back to the drawing board and enact broader legislation that encompasses wholesale stocks. (It won't, because Republicans will block any such proposal.) That's what Justice Samuel Alito advised in a deal Friday, urging lawmakers to fill the void he helped create. create. But Congress should not have to correct the Supreme Court's errors. On the rare occasions when it manages to overcome an impasse, the Legislature should not have to spend time correcting the laws that SCOTUS has broken. And the rest of us should not have to fear that judges, locked in their ever-increasing security detail, will cavalierly subject us to the prospect of mass slaughter. For the vast conservative majority, this matter is about puns and diagrams. For future victims of Bump Stock shootings, it's a matter of literal life and the death.

This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate's coverage of the Supreme Court's key decisions from last June. Next to Amicuswe started this year by explaining How originalism ate the law. The best way to support our work is to join Slate Plus. (If you are already a member, consider a Don Or merchandise!)