The Leader of the Pro-Death Party

MARY L TRUMP

Last Friday, I thought there was a possibility that the illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court was finally going to rule on presidential immunity. But, because they want to give Donald as much help as possible, they put the decision off yet again. And instead, they decided to kick us all in the teeth by dealing another blow to gun safety. The decision, which held that the federal ban on bump stocks is not authorized by existing statute, was so bad that Justice Sonia Sotomayor read her dissent from the bench.

This case stems from a statute put in place by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms in 2018 in the wake of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas in which the shooter holed up in the Mandalay Bay Hotel and, using several rifles that were modified with bump stocks, proceeded to slaughter 60 people and wound over 400. In the eleven minutes in which all of those people were killed and injured (some of them grievously), the mass murderer fired over 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

The United States Supreme Court had already determined that a machine gun ban was constitutional, and the ATF reasonably concluded that bump stocks are the equivalent to machine guns because guns utilizing them fire ammunition at similar rates. Friday’s ruling, written by Clarence Thomas for the six-justice super-majority, simply said, from a purely technical point of view, bump stocks are not like machine guns—because rifles using them cannot fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger, and cannot do so automatically—and therefore they cannot be banned under the same statute.

Friday was a terrible day for those of us who don’t want to die — and don’t want our kids to die — at the hands of mass murderers wielding weapons of war, modified or otherwise. The irony, of course, is that the Trump-era bump stock ban was one of the very, very few decent things the Trump administration managed to accomplish. And the Supreme Court he cobbled together, with a big assist from Mitch McConnell, Leonard Leo, and short-sighted Founder, simply declared that the 60 people murdered in Las Vegas don’t matter because of a technicality.

https://marytrump.substack.com/p/the-leader-of-the-pro-death-party