“The Supreme Court said Monday it won’t take up two cases that involved challenges to a ban enacted during the Trump administration on bump stocks . . ”
— The Associated Press
So the negative of the negative is a positive? Or something? See, the issue was a problem. So the Trump administration de-problemed it. And the U.S. Supreme Court did not un-de-problem it.
Let’s put it a little plainer than our friends in the legal reporting business:
The Supreme Court has confirmed that bump stocks are no good. And that government can ban them. That’s it, in a nutshell, and nut graph. And that should be that, unless one day the Supreme Court decides to hear a similar case.
Bump stocks are mechanisms that — not to go into too much detail — use a rifle’s recoil energy to load another shell for automatic firing. It happens so quickly, and only takes one pull of the trigger to empty a magazine, that the rifle is turned into a de facto machine gun. Making it forbidden by common sense. And now by legal ruling.
It’s a good bet that most Americans, even gun owners, never heard of “bump stocks” before the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. The gunman used rifles to fire more than 1,000 rounds into a crowd at a concert, shooting down on victims from his high-rise hotel room. Sixty people were killed and more than 850 injured. And most of the gunman’s rifles were fitted with those bump stocks.
After the massacre, the Trump administration decided to ban bump stocks at the federal level. And now that the court has ruled — and unless it rules otherwise in the future — bump stocks will be verboten.
Machine guns aren’t completely illegal. But it takes so much paperwork and background checks and general license requirements that most people don’t bother. Apparently the country likes it that way, and has since the 1930s when Tommy guns (Thompson machine guns) were used by the syndicates to enforce their bloody rules.
These bump stocks gave certain folks fully automatic weapons without all those checks, licenses and inspections. In some cases with murderous results.
Now that the court has ruled, or at least now that the court has not taken up challenges to the ban, the nation can move on as before, with at least one rule to limit the mayhem in the streets.
There now.
This one issue is no longer a problem.