Bearing Arms By Cam Edwards 2/26/2024
Which, of course, is another way of saying that they don't have the letter of the law on their side. The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments in Cargill v. Garland on Wednesday, and the fundamental question before the Court is whether a bump stock device is a “machinegun” as defined in 26 U.S.C. 5845(b) because it is designed and intended for use in converting a rifle into a machinegun, which, under federal law, is “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
For years the ATF approved bump stocks for sale, but after the Route 91 festival shooting in Las Vegas in 2017, the agency reversed course and banned the product, declaring that its prior determinations did “not reflect the best interpretation of the term ‘machinegun.’ The ATF concluded that the phrase “single function of the trigger" also encompasses a “‘single pull of the trigger,’” and even "motions 'analogous' to a single pull; an argument persuasive to a couple of federal appellate courts, but not the Fifth Circuit, which ruled that the ATF's new definition stretched far beyond what the federal statute in question actually says.
Ahead of Wednesday's court hearing, both sides are using the press to make their case, with ABC News set to run a report on bump stocks on Primetime Live tonight. The network spoke to Michael Cargill, who's leading the charge to have the ATF's current rules overturned, along with bump stock creator Jeremiah Cottle, survivors of the Las Vegas shooting, and several gun control activists who inadvertently helped demonstrate the weakness of the government's argument.
Steve Kling, a retired Army commander of a small arms training unit and a gun safety advocate for the Giffords organization, said ATF's reversal reflects a more accurate analysis of federal law.
"The spirit of the law is to prevent automatic weapons, weapons that have a significant cyclical rate of fire, from being on our streets and possessed by just anyone," he said.
"I've fired a lot of automatic weapons, including ones with bump stocks. There's no question that they're fun. It's fun to drive a supercar at 180 miles an hour down a highway. But we don't allow that either," Kling said.
Again, a firearm equipped with a bump stock isn't an "automatic" weapon, no matter how much Kling believes otherwise. And while we may not allow drivers to go 180 mph, we also don't ban cars that can go that fast (though California lawmakers are giving it their best shot).
More:
https://bearingarms.com/camedwards/2024/02/26/gun-control-activists-claim-spirit-of-the-law-on-their-side-in-bump-stock-case-n1223966
