“And this is yet another example of the legal profession—mostly the problem is on the Left—of treating the law like a word game: your goal as lawyers and judges is to string together the right sequence of words and phrases, like an incantation, to get the desired result: there are no right or wrong answers, just human will. ”

Sadly, you are right… 🙁

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/22-976_e29g.pdf

The majority opinion expertly and clearly dismantles the ATF’s new bump stock argument, complete with diagrams.

In contrast, the Court’s three-lady minority (excepting ACB) are all about teh tragedy and don’t advance any kind of logical argument on the facts, about the mechanics of triggers, bump firing, etc. at all.

Because the clear text of the statute doesn’t yield their preferred political result—the ATF having the authority to regulate whatever it pleases as “machine guns”—their opinion waves away all the detailed, clear, and inescapable arguments for why bump stocks aren’t machine guns, and instead retreats to a generic Hail Mary for statutory analysis that says you can’t interpret a statute in a way that allows it to be evaded or defeated—the presumption against ineffectiveness. Yep, that’s basically all they’ve got.

Oh Sotomayor—or, more accurately, her clerk—does make a weak perfunctory effort to claim that there is a common sense understanding of a “single function of the trigger” that means the shooter only squeezes his finger once and that the trigger itself moving back and forward only counts as one “function of the trigger” which is both ludicrous and also—take it from a gun nut, Sonia’s law clerk!—NOT the common understanding of what a single pull of the trigger means.

As the majority shows, this rests on conflating/confusing a single flex of the finger for a single pull of the trigger.

And this is yet another example of the legal profession—mostly the problem is on the Left—of treating the law like a word game: your goal as lawyers and judges is to string together the right sequence of words and phrases, like an incantation, to get the desired result: there are no right or wrong answers, just human will.

The idea is to create enough plausible deniability that you are not just making stuff up. Just throw some stuff at the wall, and as long as you can claim some sort of weak justification for the direction of your judgement, mission accomplished. (Coincidentally, this is why people hate lawyers.)

And the minority doesn’t address why the ATF thought a bump stock wasn’t a machine gun for decades, and then did a 180. Did the law change? No, Democrat politics did. If the ATF really agreed with Sonia’s law clerk’s claim of the common understanding of a single function of the trigger, it would have classified bump stocks as machine guns the whole time. So it is obvious that neither the industry, or experts in government, or average shooters, actually had this “common” understanding.

(And how can a “stock” be a “gun” in the first place!)

That the mass murder in Las Vegas was horrible and intolerable is not in dispute. But changing the law in the immediate wake of a tragedy often (always?) leads to bad law. In this case, the ATF didn’t even have the power/prerogative to change the law, but went ahead anyway—the fierce urgency of now, no doubt.

IMO we should ban changes of the law in response to tragedies until, say, 6 months has elapsed—or maybe we’d make them clear a higher vote threshold. I don’t know how you could write a law to that effect, though. It’s one of those pieces of societal wisdom that aren’t codified but contribute to a healthy polity. (N.B. Lots of commie hellhole countries have fine-sounding constitutions. It’s the unwritten cultural practices that are missing.)