So-called originalists — judicial interpreters of the Constitution who paradoxically insist that interpretation is unwarranted — claim to apply the letter of the law without regard for the spirit of the law, which they assert is unknowable and therefore subject to speculation. This stance used to be popularly called strict constructionism, and it is strict, though in its actual application this ostensible judicial restraint often results in a rejection of common sense.
According to Harvard’s famed constitutional law professor Laurence Tribe, the current Supreme Court bangs into common sense all the time — and common sense too often doesn’t stand a chance against ideology masquerading as discipline and restraint.
The latest example of this — and one that unlike many SCOTUS decisions does not require sophisticated knowledge of esoteric systems like election law, pharmaceutical development processes, or macroeconomics — is the bump stock decision.
The Supreme Court, refusing to acknowledge that bump stocks transform a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun, ruled that a Trump-era ATF ban on bump stocks is illegal — beyond the ATF’s authority to mandate.
The machine gun has been illegal since 1934, its dangers — as a weapon that requires only a single trigger pull to fire unceasingly — manifestly apparent. With bump stocks, which allow a single trigger pull to create the same continuous firing of a weapon, a semi-automatic gun is essentially transformed into a machine gun.
This is indisputable — after all, to mimic the continuous firing action of a machine gun is the reason bump stocks were created. Or it is indisputable unless you are, as Tribe puts it, one of the six SCOTUS Justices who “will soon have blood-soaked robes.” Or blood on their hands, in more common parlance, when the next mass shooter using bump stocks strikes innocent club goers or students or peaceful protesters, killing dozens with a single trigger pull.
The 1934 Firearms Act bans civilian ownership of a “machine gun,” defined as a weapon that can fire “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” 26 U. S. C. §5845(b). A semi-automatic weapon requires the shooter to pull the…
— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) June 15, 2024
“Six Justices,” Tribe writes, “who will soon have blood-soaked robes overrode the ATF’s common sense conclusion that keeping pressure on your trigger finger long enough for your gun to fire 13 times PER SECOND is a ‘single function’ as Congress used that term. The fact that the six were taking aim at the administrative state and not at those whom the next crazed shooter will kill by firing 800 rounds per minute with each pull of his trigger finger may enable them to sleep at night, but it shouldn’t.”