The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority carved a huge loophole into the federal prohibition against machine guns on Friday, striking down a bump stock ban first enacted in 2018 by the Trump administration. Its 6–3 decision allows civilians to convert AR-15–style rifles into automatic weapons that can fire at a rate of 400–800 rounds per minute. One might hope a ruling that stands to inflict so much carnage would, at least, be indisputably compelled by law. It is not.
Now the Supreme Court has decided that it understands firearms better than the ATF. Thomas’ majority opinion reads like the fevered work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even aof the firearm, plainly relished the opportunity to depict the inner workings of these cherished tools of slaughter. To reach his preferred result, Thomas falsely accused ATF of taking the “position” that bump stocks were legal, then “abruptly” reversing course after the Las Vegas shooting.
And why? Yes, a deep current of gun fetishism runs through Thomas’ opinion. But so, too, does an arrogant skepticism of federal agencies like ATF and the experts who staff them. The majority snidely casts aside ATF’s interpretation in favor of its own amateur conception of how a true machine gun operates.
Yes, Congress can go back to the drawing board and enact a broader law that sweeps in bump stocks. That’s what Justice Samuel Alito advised in a concurrence on Friday, urging lawmakers to patch the loophole that he helped to create. But Congress shouldn’t have to correct the Supreme Court’s mistakes. On the rare occasions when it can overcome gridlock, the legislative branch should not have to expend time fixing laws that SCOTUS broke. And the rest of us should not have to worry that the justices, cocooned in their ever-expanding security details, will cavalierly subject us to the prospect of mass slaughter. To the conservative supermajority, this case is about word games and diagrams.