The Supreme Court Wants More People to Die in Mass Shootings

We live in this most violently gun-addicted industrialized nation on Earth for one reason, and one reason alone: Republicans control our Supreme Court. The gun violence that rages throughout our country does not happen because Americans are more culturally prone to violence than other people. It doesn’t happen because we play violent video games or watch violent movies. It doesn’t happen because of racial strife, poverty and inequality, or economic grievances. It happens because the Republicans operatives on the court welcomes violence. It happens because they simply won’t allow us to protect ourselves from violence; because they would rather watch children die than risk Congress or the president laying a finger on the National Rifle Association or Ruger or any arms dealer who makes their living selling death. It happens because we allow six ammosexual maniacs sitting on the Supreme Court to rule over all of us, despite the fact that none of us voted for them.

The latest savage act of the court’s conservative death cult comes in the form of Garland v. Cargill. In a 6-3 ruling earlier today, divided along partisan lines, the conservative majority overturned a 2017 ban on “bump stocks” that was enacted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) during the Trump administration. In 2017, a mass shooter killed 60 people and injured over 400 when he fired on a crowd at a Las Vegas music festival. Paddock was able to kill and injure so many people because he had turned his semiautomatic weapon into a fully automatic weapon—functionally, a machine gun—with the aid of a bump stock.

A bump stocks is a mechanical device, affixed to the butt of a gun, that captures the recoil from firing a weapon and cycles that kinetic energy back into the shooter’s trigger finger. The shooter fires a bullet, the weapon “bumps” against their shoulder, and that action produces an additional bullet, and so on. By using bump stocks, Paddock was able to fire over 1,000 bullets in 10 minutes in Las Vegas.

The Las Vegas music festival massacre is the deadliest mass shooting ever carried out by a single gunman in US history. One of the reasons it is still the deadliest mass shooting in the history of the country—despite the fact that it happened seven years ago and this country endures a mass shooting nearly every day, including 225 in 2024, so far—is likely because, after the shooting, the Trump administration banned bump stocks. “Machine guns” and enhancements that turn guns into machine guns have been banned in this country since 1934, thanks to the National Firearms Act. Trump’s ATF merely classified bump stocks as one of those attachments that makes a gun a machine gun, and took it off the market.

The move angered ammosexuals who need bump stocks for… well, I can’t tell you why anybody would need to fire 1,000 bullets in 10 minutes, other than to kill as many people as possible. Nevertheless, a gun-store owner named Michael Cargill sued the ATF for making him give up his bump stocks. Conservatives quickly glommed onto the case, including Republican neo-Confederate super-lawyer Jonathan Mitchell (who invented the Texas abortion bounty hunting law). That makes sense when you remember that Republicans like Mitchell think women should be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term; this way, women can give birth to additional targets for ammosexuals to aim at.

The case was argued in front of the Supreme Court in February and, as I explained at the time, the justices came up with a grammatical way to determine whether bump stocks fall under the umbrella of the National Firearms Act ban on machine guns and machine-gun enhancements, instead of a rational one; they pretended the legal issue hinged on whether bump stocks could be determined to work by means of a single “function” of the trigger or by means of a single “pull” of the trigger. Conservatives argued that bump stocks cannot be banned because they still require the trigger to “function” once per bullet. Liberals argued that bump stocks can and must be banned because the shooter “pulls” the trigger only once to fire a continuous hail of bullets.

This is an easy case if you look at it from the perspective of the shooter. With the aid of a bump stock, the shooter pulls once, and the gun fires automatically, just as it would in the case of a machine gun. But the conservative majority insisted on looking at the case from the perspective of the gun. Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, included multiple diagrams of the inner workings of a gun, to illustrate that the gun is operating based on multiple “functions” of the trigger. His framing would make sense if guns could think for themselves, fire for themselves, and perform musical numbers encouraging school children to “be my guest” or, more likely, “make my day.” But since guns are not anthropomorphized Disney characters imbued with agency and purpose, Thomas’s decision to center the law from the perspective of the gun is both stupid and horrific.

The shooter is the one with agency in this situation. The shooter is the one who pulls the trigger. How the gun fires, from the shooter’s perspective, is the legally important question here, not the inner monologue of the clockwork.

Sonia Sotomayor called out the majority’s entirely wrong frame in her dissent. She wrote: “A machinegun does not fire itself. The important question under the statute is how a person can fire it.”

But she didn’t stop there. Underneath the majority’s inane focus on the operation of the gun as opposed to the shooter is the fact that the conservatives also failed a basic test of statutory interpretation. The court is supposed to apply laws along the lines Congress intended, and there’s no real question that Congress intended to ban machine guns and weapons that act like machine guns when it passed the National Firearms Act. All of the tools conservatives usually apply when they try to figure out what Congress intended when it passed a given law points towards banning bump stocks.