Lawyer Opposing Snap Action Ban Repeatedly Explains to Liberal Justices How Guns Work

The lawyer opposing the Trump-era ban on bump stocks repeatedly corrected liberal Supreme Court justices on the operation of semiautomatic firearms during oral arguments Wednesday.

Liberal justices frequently pointed to the fact that a stock allows a semi-automatic to fire at the same rate as a machine gun, making it “functionally” like an automatic weapon. Jonathan Mitchell, the attorney representing U.S. Army veteran who challenged the ban, Michael Cargill, said speed isn't what matters; it is the operation of the trigger itself.

“It is wrong to say that a trigger function automatically starts a chain reaction that propels multiple bullets from the gun,” Mitchell told Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. “A trigger function fires a shot, then the shooter must take an additional manual action.”

The case, Garland v. Cargill, challenges the Trump administration's ban on bump stocks after the 2017 Las Vegas concert mass shooting, which was implemented by interpreting the definition of “machine gun” in federal law restricting the transfer or possession of machine guns to include rejection actions. Mitchell argued that the government's interpretation fails in two respects: A stock does not make a gun automatic, and it does not change the trigger mechanism to allow more than one shot per function.

National Firearms Act define a “machine gun” as a weapon that automatically fires more than one shot “with a single trigger function.” Stock devices allow semi-automatic rifles to fire quickly by using the recoil of the weapon to help “slam” the trigger against the finger.

Judge Sotomayor says spring actions allow you to fire automatically when you hold the trigger. Cargill says this is wrong again

— Coalition for Gun Policy (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024

Justice Elena Kagan argued that the law was intended to restrict “anything that requires some human action to produce more than one shot.”

“That's not how they wrote the statute,” Mitchell replied. With a stock stroke, he explained that the trigger still needs to be reset each shot, and there is only one shot fired per trigger function.

“I consider myself a good textualist,” Kagan said. “But textualism is not incompatible with common sense. A weapon that fires a multitude of shots with a single human action, either continuous pressure on a conventional machine gun, pulling the trigger, or continuous pressure on one of these devices in the barrel; I don't understand how anyone could do that. I think those two things should be treated differently.”

In response to a question from Justice Samuel Alito, Mitchell noted that Congress may have had policy reasons for excluding received stocks from the definition of a machine gun, such as how it might help people with disabilities such as arthritis.

“Even a person with arthritis, why would Congress think they needed to shoot 400 to 700 or 800 rounds of ammunition under any circumstances?” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked.

The government's effort to turn legal stocks and their law-abiding owners into illegal machine guns owned by criminals is terrifying.

Hear NCLA's customer story @michaeldcargillTexas gun store owner, challenging ATF effort to rewrite federal statute. pic.twitter.com/R24HSsO230

— New Civil Liberties Alliance (@NCLAlegal) February 28, 2024

Several of the conservative justices expressed some level of skepticism toward the government's argument.

“Intuitively, I'm completely sympathetic to your argument. It appears that yes, this works like a machine gun,” Judge Amy Coney Barret told Senior Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Fletcher. “But looking at that definition, I think the question is, why didn't Congress pass this legislation to make it clearer?”

Judge Neil Gorsuch worried that the reinterpretation of the definition, which came after both previous Democratic and Republican administrations refused to include bump stocks in the definition of machine guns, would suddenly make up to half a million federal criminals americans Judge Brett Kavanaugh expressed concern that the rule would “catch out” people who were unaware of the change.

At one point, Gorsuch seemed incredulous that people would “sit down and read the Federal Register.”

“That's what they do at night for fun,” he joked. “Gun owners open it next to the fire and the dog.”

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