Dear friends,
The federal ban was a 2018 Trump-era regulation, issued after a mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival,
in which a gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds, killing 60 people and injuring almost 500.
The legal basis of the decision is that the regulation is inconsistent with the definition of machine guns in current federal law.
[I]n her scathing dissent, the liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor accused her conservative colleagues of ignoring bump stocks’ ability to transform semiautomatic firearms into much more powerful and deadly weapons.
“When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck,” Sotomayor wrote. “A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger’ … Because I, like Congress, call that a machine gun, I respectfully dissent.”
An irony of right-wing politics in the US today are the simultaneous efforts to consolidate executive power and to dismantle the administrative state that makes rules. According to the dissenters, the majority read the law too narrowly, and therefore tossed a sound regulation.
The only way to create an enforceable ban on bump stocks is to pass it through Congress. Let’s not wait for the next devastating mass shooting.
Tell Congress to pass a federal ban on bump stocks.
with love,
L