Tragedy erupted on Oct. 1, 2017, at a country music festival in Las Vegas when a lone shooter killed 60 attendees from a 32ndstory hotel window. Mainly using AR-15 style weapons with the help of a bump stock, the shooter carried out the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in history.Following the tragedy, President Donald Trump asked the Alcohol, Tabacco and Firearms Agency to reclassify bump stocks as machine gun accessories and ban them. However, a Texas gun store owner sued the federal government on the grounds that bump stocks were wrongfully classified. This past week the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the ban on grounds having nothing to do with gun control.Here is the thing: while there is outrage over this decision – mainly because the decision looks political with a 6-3 spilt along party lines – what it actually shows is a misunderstanding of the courts and possibly the biggest mistake of the Founding Fathers with the Constitution.First, let me be clear. I am not making any Second Amendment arguments here. I have written plenty on the Second Amendment and the Founders’ intentions. For this case, there is actually no need to bring up the Second Amendment. That is the misunderstanding. I am also not going to argue for or against gun control in any way. And neither did the court, or at least the six justices who voted against this ban. A large part of this ruling is that bump stocks do not make rifles automatic weapons.There is a lot of hairsplitting here, but in legal cases, hairsplitting matters. While bump stocks allow rifles to shoot as fast as an automatic weapon, they do not make them “automatic.” By definition an automatic rifle will fire more than one round with a single pull of the trigger. A bump stock works with a semiautomatic weapon which shoots one projectile per pull of the trigger. However, a bump stock uses the recoil of the rifle to create the same speed as an automatic but by definition does not make the weapon “automatic.” The mechanisms are different. I understand how this can be frustrating, but there is a difference, and in law those differences matter. If people want to change the rules about what is an automatic weapon, there is a way to do that and that brings up the second and more important point.As you read the news and ...
