Clarence Thomas' bump stock death wish for America

Illustration from New York Times

In 2017, a man with bump stock-enhanced rifles perched himself at a Las Vegas hotel window, trained his crosshairs on thousands of concert-goers below, and murdered 60 people. He permanently maimed hundreds more, concluding his carnage within a matter of minutes.

After the slaughter, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives issued a rule classifying bump stocks as “machine guns” under 26 U.S.C. § 5845(b), and banned their sale.

Last week, Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the radicalized 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court, overturned the ban, claiming that, “a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock is not a machine gun,” given that “it cannot fire more than one shot by a single function of the trigger.”

Thomas substituted the federal agency’s expertise with his own personal opinion to conclude that a bump stock leaves the trigger finger in place after the shooter fires, but then the gun’s recoil continues to hammer the trigger so it’s not technically “a single function of the trigger,” even though the rapid-fire deadly results are the same.

Thomas sentences Americans to mass slaughter

Thomas’ callous disregard for life- playing word games to legalize bump stocks that function like machine guns- is hard to stomach. As the ATF argued, legalizing bump stocks simply because the trigger moves back and forth “exalts artifice above reality” to evade one of the few still-standing gun regulations under the 1934 National Firearms Act.

Thomas needs to tell families who have lost children and loved ones to mass shootings how an automatic recoil hammering the trigger makes any difference to the permanent, gaping hole left in their lives.

Thomas is presumably safe from his own death warrant, because, unlike most Americans, he travels in the rarefied safety of a billionaire’s private jet. When he’s not on Harlon Crow’s aircraft, Thomas and his insurrectionist wife, Virginia, travel in a tricked out RV—- complete with a bulletproof Detroit Diesel engine financed by another wealthy patron.

NRA-backed Republicans bastardize the 2^nd Amendment

The 2nd Amendment does not say what the NRA, Thomas, and right wing radicals on the Supreme Court claim it does. The 2nd A states, in its entirety:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a

free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,

shall not be infringed.

This Amendment was adopted in 1791 when General George Washington, recently returned from the Revolutionary War, was the Constitutional Convention president. Washington had just lived through the British occupation, and the colonies’ need to form and outfit a defensive militia was fresh in his mind. Nowhere does the 2^nd A state that citizens have the right to bear arms against each other or their neighbors, rather, the right to bear arms was a matter of collective defense.

Many Constitutional scholars, including the former Chief Justice Warren Burger, interpret this clause as it was written. Anyone can read that the ‘right to bear arms’ is in the same sentence as ‘well regulated militia.’ However, putative originalists on the Court, who otherwise claim to honor the original language in all Constitutional text, have deleted “well regulated militia” right out of existence:

• In 2008, in Heller, conservatives on the Supreme Court declared for the first time that the Second Amendment “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” Conservatives on the Court decided that the militia language in the 2^ndAmendment may have announced a purpose for the 2^nd Amendment, but that the right of individual gun ownership was not limited to that purpose.

• In 2022, expanding Heller further, Justice Thomas wrote the shameful Bruen decision to overturn New York’s concealed carry law.  In Thomas’ view, an individual’s interest in carrying a concealed gun outweighs the government’s interest in reducing gun deaths. Thomas held that New York state’s concealed carry law- requiring a person to “demonstrate a special need for self-protection” in order to carry a gun into public arenas, public transit, churches and concerts, prevented “law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms in public.”  

Shady pro-gun results driven by shady pro-gun “research”

Turns out that multiple, federal pro-gun decisions have relied on “independent” gun research collected and presented by a single researcher, William English, who is anything but independent.

The New York Times recently reported that Dr. English, an economist at Georgetown University, has peddled NRA-backed research while refusing to disclose who funds his work.  English’s research ostensibly backs conservatives’ claim that most gun owners don’t use their guns offensively; rather, most gun owners use them in self-defense.

Reviewing his survey instruments, however, other researchers say English’s surveys employ deliberately ambiguous wording, written to elicit answers that overstate the degree to which guns are used in self-defense. Equally problematic, his research results lack formal peer review. There’s nothing independent about English’s questionable “research” either- the NYT reports that it has been mostly driven by litigation “backed with millions of dollars in dark money flowing through nonprofits that often exist only on paper.”

Clarence Thomas’ gun fetish would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous

Justice Thomas paved the way for last week’s bump stock endorsement with his ridiculous 2022 Bruenopinion. In Bruen, Thomas swept away all modern gun restrictions that cannot be tied to an “historical antecedent,” meaning, if a similar gun law like concealed carry didn’t exist hundreds of years ago, we can’t have it now.  Never mind that in 1790 it was physically impossible to shove a bayonet, infantry rifle, or musket down one’s pants and still walk.

Striking modern gun restrictions because they didn’t exist 250 years ago is as logical as outlawing electric cars because the founders didn’t drive them.  Like the Dobbs decision overturning Constitutional protection for abortion, Bruen and the bump stock case represent sleight of hand by conservatives to support their dangerous, desired legal outcome. Dobbs left women dying in parking lots, just as putting bump stocks back on the street will lead to more deaths.

Although the Court just upheld a gun law that protects victims of domestic violence, NRA-backed justices have been lying about the 2^nd A since at least 2008, putting all of us at risk.  May this be the decision that puts SCOTUS in the crosshairs of American voters, upsetting them enough- to Vote!- and make court reform an election priority this November.