On Friday, the high court struck down the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) ’s prohibition of these popular firearm accessories with a 6-3 decision.
Within hours, President Joe Biden (D) posted on X that the ruling was a rallying cry for anti-Second Amendment forces.
“Today’s Supreme Court decision strikes down an important gun safety regulation. We know thoughts and prayers are not enough. I call on Congress to ban bump stocks, pass an assault weapon ban, and take action to save lives — send me a bill, and I will sign it immediately.
That is highly unlikely considering the current makeup of the House, but this did not stop the chest-thumping that followed Friday’s decision.
The White House later attached a longer statement to the social media post in which it praised itself for actions taken against gun rights.
Resorting to targeting the favorite boogeyman of anti-gunners, the release claimed success in battling the NRA to secure passage of the so-called Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
This act, which did draw a modicum of support across the political aisle, has since been weaponized to go after law-abiding gun dealers and private owners — just as opponents warned.
The release further touted the creation of the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which is merely window dressing for the fight against gun rights and does nothing to solve rampant crime.
However, these controversial unilateral moves met with strong resistance in the judiciary system, and many were halted or struck down one after another. For example, in recent days, a preliminary injunction was granted against the ATF’s background check requirement.
Then came the widely celebrated Supreme Court decision to end the ATF’s gun stock ban. These simple devices reduce the time necessary between separate functions of the weapon’s trigger, enabling the sportsman to fire faster.
This is well within the purview of Congress to regulate, but lawmakers and even the ATF for years found nothing illegal about the hundreds of thousands of bump stocks in circulation.
But the agency in 2018, under former President Donald Trump (R), responded to the Las Vegas mass shooting the year before by enacting a total ban on these accessories. It determined, without the input of lawmakers, that the addition of a bump stock to a weapon transforms the firearm into a machine gun.
Incredibly, the ATF action was based on the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA), a law that precisely defined the workings of a machine gun in a way that did not fit the effects of utilizing a bump stock.
In its wording, a machine gun is “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
A single function of the trigger.
Attaching a bump stock to a firearm enables the weapon to be fired more rapidly, but this is not accomplished by pulling the trigger just once. Instead, it must be drawn back just like a regular gun, which clearly contradicts the wording of the NFA’s definition of a machine gun.
Again, if Congress wants to take up the issue of what constitutes a machine gun, that’s well within its constitutional right to do so. However, changing the law through bureaucratic action is a clear violation of the Constitution as well as the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).
The ATF is now on notice. Despite political leaders’ bellowing, the Supreme Court emphatically ruled that it may not establish or modify laws but must instead wait for Congress to act.
Just as the Constitution proscribed.
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