A Bump Stock Silver Lining

I think the Supreme Court was wrong about bump stocks. But, if Donald Trump is reelected, we might have reason to celebrate their ruling anyway.

Last week the SCOTUS conservative majority ruled against a Trump era policy banning bump stocks. They did not say that there was a Second Amendment right to these damn things. They simply said that the Trump administration and the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms did not have authority to ban them. They said that that’s up to Congress.

I disagree with their ruling because it hung on a thread. Even less than that, it hung on a split hair. In the 1930’s Congress sensibly banned machine guns, otherwise known as automatic weapons. An automatic weapon was defined as one where a single depression of the trigger expels multiple rounds. Technically, a bump stock doesn’t do that. Instead, the thing is designed so that the kick back from one pull of the trigger on a semi-automatic weapon automatically pushes the trigger into the shooter’s finger to discharge the next round and so on multiple times. Essentially, instead of the shooter pulling the trigger, the gun forces the trigger into the shooter’s finger. The result is virtually the same, but for the fraction of a second difference between a truly automatic weapon and a semi-automatic with a bump stock.

So, it was reasonable to leave it to the regulators to define what is, for all intents and purposes, an illegal machine gun. This is different from other Court rulings I’ve agreed with on student loan forgiveness and on some EPA climate change regulations. In those cases, the policies were so significant that I agreed with the principle laid down by the Court that a president couldn’t do what Joe Biden wanted to do without approval from Congress. As a matter of policy, I didn’t like the student loan forgiveness while I did support the EPA regulations. But as a matter of principle, I thought the Court was right to strike down both.

The bump stock ruling can’t do anything but threaten public safety. After all, it was put in place in 2017 after a gunman in Las Vegas used bump stocks to kill 60 people and injure over 800 either directly or in the stampede his shooting caused. While the Court is technically correct that Congress could reinstate it, the madness of gun politics in America makes that all but impossible right now. In fact, just yesterday Senate Republicans voted down an attempt by Democrats and moderates in their own party to reinstate the ban.

So where’s this silver lining I claim to find? Well, let’s assume for a minute that Donald Trump is reelected, something that right now I peg at a 60% probability. Let’s assume he makes good on his threats to use all the powers of the executive branch to punish his enemies. In that case, he’s likely to find a Supreme Court that is not inclined to support him. The conservative majority has time and again pushed back against an aggressive executive. So far, they’ve pushed back in ways that liberals don’t like. But if the president is once again Donald Trump, liberals might find that the limits this Court has laid down work to limit Trump’s vindictive sprees.