We Scored A Victory Today, But Not a 2A Based Victory
Don't Lose Sight of What This Is, What it Could Be and
Most Conservatives are happy about today’s SCOTUS ruling regarding bump stocks. They should be. George Washington said it best: “Firearms are second in importance only to the Constitution. They are the peoples’ liberty’s teeth.” A bump stock is one of the few things that can help civilians if they’re forced to fight off the forces of a corrupt government. They’re important.
What else is important is the reason the ban was retracted. Per the New York Times:
Justice Thomas said that the dissenting justices ignored Congress’s definition of a machine gun.
“A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does,” Justice Thomas wrote.
In his concurring opinion, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. largely agreed with that assessment, finding that “there is simply no other way to read the statutory language.”
Neither justice refers to the Second Amendment. That makes sense. The Bump Stock Ban was not negated because of anything to do with the rights of all people everywhere to bear arms in defense against their government. (And yes, all people have that right whether their government recognizes it or not.) SCOTUS did something that matters even more: They put the executive branch in its place.
What actually happened here was that SCOTUS told the ATF that they’re not allowed to make laws. The six Conservative justices finally told the Executive Branch to go fuck itself. It’s about time.
The job of the Executive Branch and its titular head, POTUS, that they don’t have the right to make laws based on what they think the law should be. Of course liberals don’t get that. Per Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor:
In her dissent, Justice Sotomayor pushed back on those interpretations.
“Today, the court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands,” Justice Sotomayor wrote. “To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of ‘machine gun’ and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose.”
“This is not a hard case,” she wrote. She added that the majority opinion “looks to the internal mechanism that initiates fire, rather than the human act of the shooter’s initial pull,” in an interpretation that “requires six diagrams and an animation to decipher the meaning of the statutory text.”
In other words “You can ban bump stocks because I don’t like them and to hell with what the law says.” Sorry, Sotomayor, it doesn’t work that way.
The United States has a Congress for a reason. The Constitution clearly grants to Congress - the Legislative Branch of the US Government - the right to make laws.
Article. I.
Section. 1.
All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.
It’s not hard. The Executive Branch doesn’t make laws. It executes the laws that Congress has made.
Article. II.
Section. 1.
The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
The various departments report to POTUS.
Section. 2.
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States; he may require the Opinion, in writing, of the principal Officer in each of the executive Departments, upon any Subject relating to the Duties of their respective Offices, and he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.
He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
Yup, ATF works for the President. Trump supported the ban at the time it took place. And look, POTUS is actually required to execute the law as written:
Section. 3.
He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary Occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper; he shall receive Ambassadors and other public Ministers; he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed, and shall Commission all the Officers of the United States.
“He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Not “he shall come to office with a declared package of laws to be enacted and push them through.” That’s Congress’ job.
Let’s be real here. We’re a long way from faithfully executing the Constitution. Things like this, however, keep us from getting further away. I even hope this decision brings us a little closer to the way things should be. We’ll see how it goes. At least we didn’t lose more ground today regardless.
The bit at the bottom of this article (https://notthebee.com/article/supreme-court-overturns-bump-stock-ban-clarence-thomas-writes-majority-opinion ) mentions something else in the wise Latina's dissent that makes banning AR-15s hard for any future gun-grabber and helps kill the Illinois laws dead
" In today's Cargill/bump stock opinion, the below statement from Sotomayor/Kagan/Jackson will have major implications for AR-15 ban cases. Their dissent reads: "Within a matter of minutes, using several hundred rounds of ammunition, the [Vegas] shooter killed 58 people and wounded over 500. He did so by affixing bump stocks to COMMONLY AVAILABLE, SEMIAUTOMATIC RIFLES." In my view, this is a devastating legal admission by the left that AR-15s are "in common use" and cannot be banned under Heller/Bruen. "