Garland v. Cargill: Bump stock decision from SCOTUS

The Wikipedia article on Ms. Sotomayor makes interesting reading. Apparently at every step along her career, at least beginning with her admission to Princeton if not with her admission to high school, she has been a beneficiary of "affirmative action" in admissions, being admitted even though her academic performance and test scores were sub-par and in employment.
 
And as we have have now sown, so have we now reaped.

If wishes were horses on the Supreme Court is corrosive to the rule of Law.
 
Webleymkv said:
Sotomayor seems to be angling to be the new John Paul Stevens in that she seems to be the dissenter most willing to use, to put it politely, "creative" reasoning to get to the conclusion she wants. Whether or not a bump-stock or any other accessory turns a semi-automatic firearm into "functionally" a machine gun is irrelevant. Thomas and the rest of the majority made the correct decision for two reasons.

1. A machine gun is, legally, very specifically defined and bump stocks do not meet that specific definition ergo, bump stocks are not illegal.

2. Because a machine gun is so specifically legally defined and ATF does not have the power to make or change law (only congress can do that) then ATF does not have the authority without an act of congress to redefine what is or is not a machine gun including bump stocks.

It seems to me that Sotomayor is attempting to argue that while bump stocks may not violate the letter of the law, they violate its spirit or intent. While this is probably true, the letter of the law is all that really matters as there have been plenty of people convicted and sent to prison who, while complying with the spirit or intent of the law, violated its letter, often unintentionally. A situation where one can comply with the letter of a law, rule, or regulation but completely contradict is intention or vice-versa is a classic case of unintended consequences and the fault for such a situation rests not with the people who take advantage of it or are victimized by it, but squarely on the shoulders of the people who made such poorly thought out laws, rules, or regulations.

Actually, Sotomayor's argument brings up another point that I doubt she meant to, but I think is worthy of exploration. If the NFA's prohibitions on machine guns (bump stocks, binary triggers, forced-reset triggers), and short-barrel rifles and shotguns (pistol braces) are so easily side-stepped, then of what use is the NFA? If we suppose for a moment that Sotomayor is correct in that bump-stocks turn semi-automatic weapons "functionally if not legally" into machine guns or that pistol braces turn handguns "functionally if not legally" into short-barreled rifles, then why do we not have motorized bandits running amok and blood running in the streets? What I think Sotomayor and others like her haven't thought about is that her "walks like a duck and quacks like a duck" argument cuts both ways. If you can so easily have something that creates a "functional equivalent" to an NFA item yet we don't seem to have the problems that the NFA is supposed to prevent, they why are NFA items worth regulating to begin with?
Click to expand...
This is exactly right! ATF doesn't have the power to change laws. Congress can change the law to define machine guns as "bla bla bla ... and bumpstocks". But, if it were to do that, it would also have to open a registry for legally owned bumpstocks, or condemn them and buy them from owners. Question is, would this also open the registry to adding any machine guns?
 
she seems to be the dissenter most willing to use, to put it politely, "creative" reasoning to get to the conclusion she wants
Click to expand...

It's a judicial philosophy known as pragmatism. She wants to make decisions based on their (perceived) impact on things like public safety.

Problem is, that's not their job. Their job is to resolve legal disputes. The majority opinion is the result of an approach called textualism, which examines the text and intent of the law. That was the proper course to take.

(Interesting side note: the court recently ruled discrimination against gay and transgender people to be a violation of the Civil Rights Act. The majority opinion was authored by Gorsuch under the same approach. It's interesting to follow his logic on it.)
 
The genie left the bottle.

Back in the day I may have printed a very functional bump stock. These days I don't own an AR pattern gun.
My point being entire firearms can be made from spools of filament and hardware store parts and pieces. Plenty of files and data are very available.
Anyone with a few hundred bucks and limited skills can manufacture firearms.
Most any Glock can be converted to an effective bullet hose with a simple kit. Yes, the folks here would never dream of doing so, the folks here are not the issue.
The bump stock ruling seems as much adieu over nothing.
 
The entire reason bump fire stocks were created was to be an affordable way for people to enjoy the simulation of full auto fire. And it was 100% legal, until it wasn't.

No, it wasn't for any practical use, it was for fun. Until ONE guy used one in a horrific mass shooting.

Then, in a typical nanny state reaction, since ONE guy did evil with it, they must be taken away from everyone. The manner chosen by the ATF was to exceed their legal authority and reclassify them as machine guns.

Remember that under the Obama administration, the ATF examined the idea and declared them not to be machineguns or firearms, and therefore not covered under current law and regulations.

After evil was done with one, the Trump administration's ATF changed their ruling, and did so without legal authority to do so, and that was what SCOTUS has just ruled on. Not the item itself, (though in a way they did, saying it did not meet the definition of machine gun) but the manner in which the ruling was changed.

Right now, a lot of very vocal people who don't understand how guns work, and only THINK they understand how the law works are screaming their heads off at the SCOTUS and every one who is in earshot about machine guns on the streets and the carnage that will result.

I'd like to think rational thinking will prevail, but I've been wrong before.
 
Regarding affirmative action, I went to law school with a girl whose family was from Jamaica. She was not unusually smart, but she had a full scholarship. Her dad was an airline pilot and made good money.

Her grades slipped, and she became distraught. Within a few days, she had a new scholarship.

I was much smarter than she was, but I paid $22,000 per year with zero discounts.

She was typical. I've known a bunch of black students, and they generally got free rides or close to it.

My school flew all the black freshmen off to Arkansas before their 1L year, secretly, and they were given free classes to help them get better first-semester grades than the rest of us.

I knew a white homosexual named Earl. His parents were very, very wealthy. They owned a bunch of farms. He got C's as an undergrad because he was lazy. He was admitted to law school anyway because of his homosexuality.

I knew a young black man who had been expelled from college in a hazing scandal. I encouraged him to apply to a major university. He was a musician. He played for the admissions committee, and they offered him full tuition on the spot. He was good, but he said other students were better. I told him to keep looking for special breaks for black students. When you're black, people associated with colleges bust their butts trying to help you. When you're white, no one cares about you. If your grades drop, if you have a medical problem, if you get arrested, if you drop out, no one even contacts you. You just disappear. Unless you're an athlete and bless society by playing a children's game on TV.

If you really want to hear from people affirmative action cheated, talk to Jews and Asians. Jews have been abused more than just about anyone, and they get nothing. Asians outdo the rest of us, so universities have imposed quotas to keep them out. Aren't they people of color? Guess not.

Sotomayor may be on the dim side for a justice. It would not have stopped her from serving as a federal judge or being promoted. There are plenty of incompetent federal judges.

You don't have to be brilliant to do a good job on the Supreme Court. Law generally isn't that hard, and the justices have lots of very smart clerks (lawyers themselves) who do the heavy lifting. Lawyers have tremendous egos, but the truth is, an average lawyer is only a little smarter than the mob.
 
SM said:
Sotomayor may be on the dim side for a justice. It would not have stopped her from serving as a federal judge or being promoted. There are plenty of incompetent federal judges.
Click to expand...

I think it's important for laymen to understand that the ability to perform constitutional or textual analysis isn't itself a task that requires first percentile intelligence. It does generally require education/socialization into the habit of handling the involved concepts.

I don't believe any of the minority voted as they did out of a lack of intelligence, and I don't really have a gripe with Sotomayor over that. I have a problem with her views. She should not think that the Court is there to benefit from her life experience as a "wise latina", and it shows something essentially defective in her view that she would think that's a good idea to express. Imagine if you'd said anything like she had. I would hope that a wise WASP man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a non-white hispanic woman who hasn’t lived that life. How would that turn out?

The split in this decision illustrates differences in goals rather than competence. If you think that the language of the law determines the limits of executive regs, the textual analysis that anyone in this thread can do matters. If you think that you sit on the Sup Ct so the nation can have the benefit of your superior wisdom, what Bork called an Olympian view, then deciding a case on what you think people dumber than you should have to accept makes perfect sense, and providing a justification like "if it quacks like a duck" will do. That will hold whether the decision is Wickard or this one.
 
To paraphrase (Reagan, I think, and several other folks I'm sure),

"the problem with our opponents is not what they don't know, but that so much of what they do know is wrong!"

If you truly believe that walking like a duck, and quacking like a duck makes it a duck, then by the same logic, you must believe witches are made of wood, and weigh the same as a duck. Monty Python "proved" it!!

:D:eek:
 
I cannot speak to Sotomayor's intelligence never having met her. However, upon first hearing her dissent quoted, I assumed she was (erroneously) referring to the spirit of the law rather than its text.

As written, I believe the law [definition] is based on the mechanical workings of the trigger (multiple discharges per single trigger pull). To me, her confused analogy seemed to attempt to place an inferred intent of the law to regulate the rate of fire. That is, if it's as fast as a machine gun, it must be a machine gun.

I think this is a more dangerous (and disingenuous) attempt at judicial legislation than it first appears.
 
zukiphile said:
I don't believe any of the minority voted as they did out of a lack of intelligence, and I don't really have a gripe with Sotomayor over that. I have a problem with her views. She should not think that the Court is there to benefit from her life experience as a "wise latina", and it shows something essentially defective in her view that she would think that's a good idea to express. Imagine if you'd said anything like she had. I would hope that a wise WASP man with the richness of his experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a non-white hispanic woman who hasn’t lived that life. How would that turn out?
Click to expand...

That's exactly what I was thinking when I read her dissent. In fact, it's exactly what I thought back when she was confirmed and made that "wise Latina" statement. She isn't on the Supreme Court to bring a Latina's family wisdom to bear on a question; she is there to rule on whether a law or a decision is or is not constitutional.

zukiphile said:
The split in this decision illustrates differences in goals rather than competence. If you think that the language of the law determines the limits of executive regs, the textual analysis that anyone in this thread can do matters. If you think that you sit on the Sup Ct so the nation can have the benefit of your superior wisdom, what Bork called an Olympian view, then deciding a case on what you think people dumber than you should have to accept makes perfect sense, and providing a justification like "if it quacks like a duck" will do.
Click to expand...
Precisely.
 
So in a nutshell, what I hope to see come out of this, for one, the ATF needs to follow actual laws, not make up their own rules on what can land someone in jail. Should make their job easier, if congress can not pass a law, then there will be less for the ATF to enforce. I have given up on the ATF ever learning what "shall not be infringed" means, or congress for that matter.
Two, would be nice to see this apply to all federal agencies and departments, immigration seems to immediately spring to mind. Would like to see them concentrate on the letter of the law, and not rewrite agency policy every time there is an administration change. But I might as well ask santa for that pony I never got many many years ago.
Third, if people who have the final say so, do not even have the basic understanding of the physical aspects of what they are ruling on, how in the hell can they rule on complicated matters? Yeah, I know that is a question not a statement, but the statement had too many words not fit for the general public.
Fourth, there have been studies after studies done,(all in the name of something, but not knowledge) on what to ban, where to ban, how hard to make a purchase, why not have a study done on who actually is pulling the trigger? Should make solving a problem easier.

Sorry about the rant, but from what I've been reading and hearing on the evening news, (I listen for the weather), everyone out there thinks this ruling is about bump stocks. This is the only place that gets it. Zukiphile and I think every admin had a summary that absolutely nailed it. Now if we could just get rid of the crazy people who are out there in public.........


Last but not least, thanks to all of you who helped me to understand what exactly it was that the SCOTUS said. The ruling was exactly what many of us had thought, I was surprised to see the SCOTUS got it too.
 
s3997m said:
Sorry about the rant, but from what I've been reading and hearing on the evening news, (I listen for the weather), everyone out there thinks this ruling is about bump stocks.
Click to expand...

The real event is a lot less exciting than Supreme Court allows machine guns!.

Overall, this isn't a bad chapter. Following the LV shooting, there was the 100% predictable race that started before the blood dried to pass through congress a ban of a lot of semiautomatic arms, and confiscation of the remainder when the current owner dies, essentially the same post Newtown bill that got dusted off and offered serially after the kind of news stories that sway the soft middle of voters who seek to have likable views. Those voters are susceptible to the news story pressure and legislative plan that changed laws in Australia and NZ. Here, that post LV legislative move was substantially deflated by the bump stock ban. That ban was also so obvious an overreach that some of us saw it as defective by design.

It stinks that people turned in their property to avoid federal prosecution and that some manufacturers of this item were put out of business by the ban. That injustice is no less an injustice just because I didn't suffer from it. I will confess to something that is irrelevant: I consider bump stocks a toy at best, a dopey sort of thing I'd give away if I were an ammunition vendor. I suspect, but don't know, that select fire is a feature that is desirable primarily because it is restricted (like jewelry quality diamonds), not because it is desirable in itself. Using bump stocks as a legislative crumple zone to deflect the energy behind a more consequential ban sacrificed a pawn for a king, and now we have the pawn back too.

We've come out the other end of the LV shooting with a Sup Ct case interpreting a "single function of the trigger" and affirming the executive place in law making. I see that as momentum in the right direction.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top