Getting It Right on Rising Stocks

The shooter in the horrific 2017 Las Vegas massacre used a “bump stock,” a device that dramatically increases the rate of fire of a semi-automatic rifle. Although Congress did not respond, the Trump administration's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) banned bump stocks by executive order, ordering owners to return or destroy the devices within 90 days.

Today, however, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court Garland v. Cargill believes that the executive branch does not have the right to ban wholesale stocks under current law. The decision offers a lesson in the dangers of executive overreach and a chance for Congress to do what it should have done in the first place.

Let's start with an introduction. Semi-automatic weapons fire one round with each pull of the trigger. “Automatic” weapons, on the other hand, fire bullets continuously while the trigger is held down. These have been tightly regulated for 90 years and are now rarely owned by civilians.

The law restricting automatic weapons regulates what it calls “machine guns,” meaning “any weapon that fires, is designed to fire, or can be easily restored to fire, automatically more than once, without manual reloading, by a single firing function. the trigger. Bump stocks are essentially a hack of this language: they emerged as a way to escape its terms.

Normally, a shooter uses his or her index finger to pull the trigger of a gun. But to “start fire,” the shooter holds his finger firmly on the trigger and pulls the weapon forward with his non-trigger hand. This continued pressure, combined with the recoil of the weapon, causes the weapon to move back and forth repeatedly. The trigger resets when the gun recoils, then pressure from the non-trigger hand “pushes” it back into the trigger finger.

A shooter can fire without a stop; Here's a YouTube video of the “belt loop trick”, like using your pants to get the quick spray effect. But a traditional stock allows the shooter to hold the weapon against their shoulder, with the stock remaining stable as the weapon moves. As the Court noted today, the device “has a rim to keep the shooter's finger on the trigger stationary.”

For years, the ATF understood the consequences of the law's wording and allowed the sale of wholesale stocks and similar inventions. (The main exception is that in 2006 it banned the use of springs to control the movement of the weapon.) Yet despite revealing a huge flaw in our regulation of automatic weapons, these devices are for the Most went unnoticed until the Las Vegas incident revealed their potential. inflicting horrific, large-scale damage.

Congress knew that banning a gun accessory would be politically difficult. The solution, supported by the National Rifle Association, was for the executive branch to enforce the law Already applied to replacement stock, despite the clear language of the law and the fact that the ATF had authorized these devices for years. Meanwhile, several bills aimed at tackling excess inventory have gone nowhere.

Any court concerned with interpreting the law as written would come to the same conclusion. Safety stocks simply do not allow a firearm to be fired multiple times with a single “trigger feature”; they help a shooter pull the trigger faster. All functional Congresshowever, would see the problem and correct the law, since virtually no one wants automatic weapons to be readily available and bump stocks make semi-automatic rifles their functional equivalent.

I'm making these points immediately after the 2017 shooting. Wholesale stocks should be treated like machine guns, but getting there requires legislation. Fortunately, as Justice Samuel Alito pointed out in his brief concurring opinion, Congress can still change the law – “and it might already have done so if the ATF had stuck to its prior interpretation.” .

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