Less than a month after he argued before the Supreme Court in favor of former President Donald Trump being returned to the ballot in Colorado, attorney Jonathan Mitchell will be back in front of the nine SCOTUS justices this week arguing against a ban on technology that makes semi-automatic weapons more lethal.
[Note: A decision on Trump’s ballot status in Colorado — where he was removed through a 14th amendment prohibition on insurrectionist office holders — hasn’t yet come down from the court, SCOTUS watchers believe Mitchell prevailed as the justices appeared “skeptical” about the constitutionality of removing the former president.]
Now Mitchell hopes to make the justices skeptical that a ban on bump stocks — technology that transforms semi-automatic weapons into automatic weapons, or “machine guns” — is constitutional. This time Mitchell argues not against a unique application of the 14th amendment but for the broadest interpretation of the Second amendment — with its “shall not be infringed” language on the “right to bear arms” at the core.
Second Amendment author James Madison might not have contemplated the invention of a firearm that could fire like an AR-15 enhanced with a bump stock mechanism, but that’s not the point for Mitchell.
“Bump-fire stocks, while simulating automatic fire, do not actually alter the firearm to fire automatically,” Jill Snyder, a special agent in charge at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said in 2018. Mitchell will argue that because they technically don’t shoot multiple rounds automatically “by a single function of the trigger” they shouldn’t be classified as automatic rifles, which are banned.
The bump stock ban was put in place in 2018 — during the Trump administration — after a mass shooting in Las Vegas where the shooter, killing 58 people, had employed bump stock technology from a hotel balcony.
Mitchell, the University of Chicago-trained former clerk for SCOTUS Justice Antonin Scalia, has argued before the court on numerous occasions. Mitchell is also regarded as the architect of a Texas abortion prohibition known as S.B.8 — AKA the “Texas Heartbeat Act” which encouraged citizens to report abortions in exchange for a cash reward.
The plaintiff in the bump stock case is Army veteran Michael Cargill, a gun store owner and instructor in Texas.
The ATF describes bump stocks as “devices that allow a semiautomatic firearm to shoot more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by harnessing the recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm to which it is affixed so that the trigger resets and continues firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter.”
I joined 85 @UChicago @UChicagoLaw classmates to call out our fellow classmate — Jonathan Mitchell — for appalling lawyer gaming.
No matter what you believe about Roe v. Wade, deliberately creating a state law to dodge current Supreme Court precedent erodes the rule of law. pic.twitter.com/W9G0NVKS0j
— Leslie Danks Burke (@LDanksBurke) October 3, 2021