The Supreme Court’s New ‘Bump Stock’ Firearms Case: A Victory for Gunowners

Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion for the Supreme Court in Garland v. Cargill—the “bump stock firearms” case—may be more important for what it does not say than for what it does.

On its face, Cargill granted a statutory victory to gun owners. Below that, however, it granted a constitutional victory to all grassroots Americans and inflicted a defeat on the powerful federal bureaucracy.

The topic addressed overtly was the ban on machine guns in the National Firearms Act of 1934. That law defines a “machine gun” as a firearm that can “shoot, automatically more than one shot ... by a single function of the trigger.”

A “bump stock” uses a rifle’s recoil to enable a shooter to greatly increase the rate of firing. So the court had to decide whether a bump stock converts a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun.

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