Fire Rate Fight: the Future of Bump Stocks
Sandy Hook. San Bernardino. Orlando. Aurora. Las Vegas. All of these places have one tragic thing in common: bump stocks leading to massive loss of life.
Bump stocks rose to national prominence after the tragic Las Vegas shootings, which saw over 50 people shot and many more injured. The conversation around bump stocks centered around how they increase the fire rate of a semi-automatic rifle to imitate that of a fully automatic weapon. Bump stocks are attached to the back of the weapon and work by “bumping” into the arm of the shooter, which causes the weapon’s trigger to bounce on the shooter’s finger.
Shortly after the Las Vegas shooting, the Trump Administration banned bump stocks through a 2018 Department of Justice rule. This rule comes from a 1968 law, the Gun Control Act, which states that a shooter cannot start a continuous cycle of fire from one pull of the trigger. The Trump Administration gave gun owners 90 days to turn over their bump stocks to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) or destroy them themselves.
However, the Supreme Court is set to hear Garland v. Cargill, a case that will decide the future of bump stocks, with implications on the legality of high fire rate weapons. The Court should decide in favor of petitioner, Garland, or they risk opening the country to weapons that have historically been used for mass shootings. In ruling for respondent, Cargill, the Court would also allow for statutory ambiguity to be leveraged against the government.
The statutory ambiguity part of this case refers to whether bump stocks fit under the “single function of the trigger” criterion that the law lays out. If the Court finds that whether bump stocks fit this criterion is ambiguous, respondents claim the rule of lenity should force the Court to rule in favor of bump stocks. Under the rule of lenity, when a statute is ambiguous in its application to an issue, the Court should side on the side of caution. In criminal law, for example, the rule of lenity means the Court must side with the defendant. In this case, the respondent contends the rule of lenity compels the Court to side against the government as a matter of principle.
Much of this case will come down to each side trying to argue convincingly that a bump stock does or does not constitute a single function of the trigger.
Petitioners will argue that it does. The bump function of a bump stock uses the recoil to push the trigger into the finger, which the petitioners argue is one trigger pull leading to a continuous cycle of fire. This fact was disputed by the Fifth Circuit, where they said that one trigger function should be the same as the push of a button.
Respondent’s argument centers around there being other actions necessary to shooting with a bump stock outside of just pulling the trigger. They argue that the shooter must also hold the finger in place, hold the rifle with their non-shooting hand with backward pressure, and lean forward.
This argument falls flat. This case should center around the legality of machine guns, not the intricacies of what constitutes a single trigger pull. The Fifth Circuit is conservative, and given the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, it is likely that they will follow the circuit court’s decision, leading the way for bump stocks and other semi-automatic attachments to become more commonplace.
Yet, ruling in this fashion would demonstrate some major hypocrisy by the Court. There is no ambiguity in the intention of the ATF rule and the 1968 Gun Control Act, which textualists like the current conservative supermajority should take into account. The Supreme Court has many textualists among its ranks, which means they should examine the original meaning and intention of the law. They instead will probably side with their ideological favoritism of Second Amendment protections.
To protect the health of the American public and stay honest to the original point of the 1968 law, the Supreme Court should overturn the Fifth Circuit and reinforce the bump stock ban. The rule of lenity should not come into play in this case; the arbitration question about ambiguity in the statute does not make sense in this case. The statute clearly applies to banning machine guns, and semi-automatic weapons with bump stocks fit this description.
The presence of near-automatic weapons is a health crisis in the United States. It constitutes a crisis due to being the leading cause of death for many age groups and for being consistently above baseline levels of gun violence over time. This legal issue has a storied past in this country, and the Court should side with a textualist reading of the law instead of blind support for the Second Amendment. This case will also have implications for the strength of Executive Branch Departments in the future; if the Court follows the rule of lenity, Executive Departments will have a weakened ability to issue definitions in their rule changes. Any definition could be challenged in court and the rule of lenity would then have to be enforced against the government. This case will have severe implications for future legal applications. Hopefully, the Supreme Court will protect the American public against bump stocks.
Andreas Rivera Young is a senior at Brown University, concentrating in Political Science and History. He is a staff writer for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at andreas_rivera_young@brown.edu.
Julian Cohen is a sophomore at Brown University, double concentrating in History and International & Public Affairs. He is an editor for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at julian_cohen@brown.edu.