A bump stock is displayed in Harrisonburg, Va., on March 15, 2019. The Supreme Court has struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns. In 2017, a man with bump stock-enhanced rifles perched himself at a Las Vegas hotel window, trained his crosshairs on thousands of concert-goers below, murdered 60 people, and permanently maimed hundreds more.
Last week, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the radicalized 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, overturned the ban, claiming that, “a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a machine gun,” given that “it cannot fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger.
Thomas is presumably safe from his own death warrant, because, unlike most Americans, he travels in the rarefied safety of a billionaire’s private jet. When he’s not on Harlan Crow’s aircraft, he travels in a tricked-out RV — complete with a bulletproof Detroit Diesel engine financed by another wealthy patron.The 2nd Amendment does not say what the NRA, Thomas, and right-wing radicals on the Supreme Court claim it does.
The New York Times recently reported that English, an economist at Georgetown University, has peddled NRA-backed research while refusing to disclose who funds his work.