"On October 1, 2017, a shooter opened fire from a hotel room overlooking an outdoor concert in Las Vegas, Nevada, in what would become the deadliest mass shooting in U. S. history. Within a matter of minutes, using several hundred rounds of ammunition, the shooter killed 58 people and wounded over 500. He did so by affixing bump stocks to commonly available, semiautomatic rifles. These simple devices harness a rifle’s recoil energy to slide the rifle back and forth and repeatedly 'bump' the shooter’s stationary trigger finger, creating rapid fire. All the shooter had to do was pull the trigger and press the gun forward. The bump stock did the rest.
"Congress has sharply restricted civilian ownership of machineguns since 1934. Federal law defines a 'machinegun' as a weapon that can shoot 'automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.' 26 U. S. C. §5845(b). Shortly after the Las Vegas massacre, the Trump administration, with widespread bipartisan support, banned bump stocks as machineguns under the statute.
"Today, the Court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of 'machinegun' and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose. When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires 'automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.' §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent..." -- Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in Garland v. Cargill (pdf), in which the illegitimate Republican Supreme Court ruled 6-3 to lift the ban on bump stocks that even the Malignant Loser's regime supported. In their utter, shameless hypocrisy, the six repellant Republican "justices" who are so devoted to "life" that they struck down Roe v. Wade (thereby impacting and imperiling the lives of millions of American women), have now said this murderous device can be loosed again into the population. Mark these words: they will have blood on their hands.
