U.S. Supreme Court 'ducks' reason on bump stocks

Under the interpretation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority, a duck is not a duck, even when it functions as a duck; and the same goes for bump-stock-equipped firearms, even when they can spit out up to 800 rounds of lethal ammunition with one pull of the finger against a trigger.

That analogy courtesy of Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent from the bench, in Friday’s 6-3 decision by the court that struck down a regulation by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) that an after-market device called a bump stock, which effectively turns a semi-automatic firearm — which normally allows only one shot for every pull of the trigger — into a machine gun capable of continuous and rapid fire.

“The majority,” Sotomayor wrote, “puts machine guns back in civilian hands.”

The ATF adopted the regulation in 2017, at the request of then-President Trump, following the mass shooting in Las Vegas, in which a gunman smuggled semiautomatic firearms, each equipped with a bump stock device, into a room on the 32nd floor of a hotel and rained down fire on a country music festival outside the hotel. Fifty-eight people were killed that night, and two of the more than 500 injured died later in a hospital.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/editorial-u-s-supreme-court-ducks-reason-on-bump-stocks/