Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion for the Supreme Court the “bump stock firearms” case may be more important for what it does not say than for what it does.
Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion for the Supreme Court in Garland v. Cargill—the “bump stock firearms” case—may be more important for what it does not say than for what it does.
On its face, Cargill granted a statutory victory to gun owners. Below that, however, it granted a constitutional victory to all grassroots Americans and inflicted a defeat on the powerful federal bureaucracy.
The topic addressed overtly was the ban on machine guns in the National Firearms Act of 1934. That law defines a “machine gun” as a firearm that can “shoot, automatically more than one shot … by a single function of the trigger.”
A “bump stock” uses a rifle’s recoil to enable a shooter to greatly increase the rate of firing. So the court had to decide whether a bump stock converts a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun.
The agency in the case was the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). For many years the ATF took the position that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock was not a machine gun. But after a 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada, the ATF re-interpreted the Federal Firearms Act by categorizing bump stock firearms as machine guns. It then demanded that all citizens who, like Michael Cargill, owned such weapons surrender them to the ATF.
Around the same time, Congress refused to pass legislation reclassifying bump stock firearms as illegal machine guns.
Justice Thomas wrote for a six-person majority. He concluded that a bump stock rifle is not a machine gun. He held that the repeated fire allowed by a bump stock does not constitute “a single function of the trigger.” Rather, it merely accelerates separate functions. He also held that a bump stock’s repeated firing is not “automatic,” because the user must do more than merely hold back the trigger. The user also must maintain forward pressure on the rifle with his non-trigger hand.
Thus, in Cargill, the justices overruled an agency’s interpretation of a congressional law administered by the agency itself. That fact brings us to the underlying constitutional significance of the case.
By Rob Natelson
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