To begin with, this is your president. This ought to be one of the most shameful things ever said by a sitting president.
"Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?"
BIDEN: "We've given everything that we have."
"Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?"
BIDEN: "No." pic.twitter.com/jDMNGhpjOz
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 30, 2024
We must have spent too much money on Ukraine to help Americans in distress. I don't…… [read more]
Here is Mark Smith on the recent bump stock ban decision.
Here is Stephen Halbrook’s article in Reason. I haven’t read the comments – I never do at Reason because it’s made up mostly of arrogant and argumentative communists who think they know more than they do.
Senate Republicans blocked Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) attempt to move forward legislation to ban bump stocks, reigniting a pre-election messaging battle over gun control measures.
Why it matters: The Supreme Court’s decision to toss a Trump-era ban on bump stocks has given Schumer an opening to put some of the chamber’s Republicans in the position of defending the gun attachment, which was used in the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) asked senators for unanimous consent Tuesday afternoon to pass a bill that would ban bump stocks, but Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) objected, thwarting the effort.
The bipartisan bill had little chance of passing the chamber and was instead introduced to force Republicans to reject it.
I would have proudly rejected it and explained to my constituency why I did so. I would have run on that rejection. The senate republicans had better reject it.
You’d think that at least her clerks would have prepared her better than this.
And here’s Justice Jackson: “And when, you know, ‘function’ is defined, it’s really not about the operation of the thing. It’s about what it can achieve, what it’s being used for. So I see Congress as putting function in this. The function of this trigger is to cause this kind of damage, 800 rounds a second or whatever.”
Maybe there’s a quad gun that can approach that rate, but still, 4500 RPM × 4 = 18000, and 18000 RPM / 60 seconds per minutes = 300 RPM. So, I don’t know of anything that can accomplish 800 rounds per second.
Can you imagine trying to hold a gun on target at that rate of fire?
Justice Kagan says that with a bump stock, you can hold the trigger and bullets come out. Cargill says that's incorrect; bump stocks don't alter the trigger at all
Justice Kagan says that with a bump stock, you can hold the trigger and bullets come out. Cargill says that's incorrect; bump stocks don't alter the trigger at all
Justice Jackson is asking why the chemical reaction after the trigger is pulled isn't the single function that causes the gun to fire automatically. Like all of Jackson's other arguments, Cargill says that is also incorrect
I listened to the arguments in Cargill before the SCOTUS for a few minutes. I’m out of time with this and cannot devote more to it. I’ll embed Mark Smith when he comes out with an analysis of it.
They’re focused on procedural issues, and nothing more. There is nothing in the arguments or even the attorney presentations dealing with the legality of the ATF just making up rules out of whole cloth.
Prediction: They will issue a ruling addressing the minutia of the procedural rules and punt this back down to the lower courts. They will avoid the issue entirely and thus free and exonerate themselves of holding anyone in the FedGov accountable.
Finally, the attorney for the plaintiff absolutely blew it. His presentation was awful, his speech stammering and stuttering, and he was slow on the responses, wasting time in his presentation.
And never forget. You have Trump to thank for this.
I don’t know what the SCOTUS will do. I suspect the two “conservative” women on the court, Roberts and Barrett, will side with the FedGov. If that’s the case, then there’s pain ahead because the ATF will use this to reinterpret semi-automatic weapons as machine guns and demand registration, tax stamp, and ATF approval of all semiautomatic firearms, which is what they want anyway.
Oh, and never forget that you have Trump to thank for this. And also, never forget that the FBI wouldn’t let the ATF examine the weapons after Las Vegas and it was never demonstrated that Paddock used bump stocks.
He makes a good case, but my question is why hasn’t the SCOTUS taken up one of the AWB cases yet? Are they still running from it like screaming little girls? That would be appropriate for Roberts and Barrett.
Regarding the bump stock ban, you have Trump to thank for that, along with the notion of making laws up by sitting in in the Oval office and telling the ATF what laws to make and the awful precedent that sets. Never forget that.
So what? It won’t matter one whit. Scary, scary, scary … Pretty Boy Floyd, Al Capone, etc., scary, scary, scary, even more scary than the mass shooting at Waco and assassination at Ruby Ridge by Lon Horiuchi, or anything else the FedGov has perpetrated.
But that’s okay, because FedGov. It’s okay when they do it.
My prediction doesn’t change. The two “conservative” women on the court, Roberts and Barrett, side with the communists on this matter and overturn the Fifth Circuit. Barrett has been a huge, huge, huge disappointment, and you can blame Trump for her, as with so many other hundreds of things. In literally a once in a lifetime opportunity, we could have had Don Willett or James Ho. Instead, we got her. Thanks, Trump. And if Barrett is the sort of judge the Federalist Society is putting up and recommending, then what good are they? Stop listening to them.
She failed to enjoin the Illinois AWB, and for the record (I didn’t know this until a few days ago), she opposed taking the Dobbs case. I guess she would have been fine leaving Roe in place.
Good. This was always going to happen, it should be sooner rather than later.
They’ll get a good dose of the facts now, including the pesky one on the FBI refusing to allow the ATF to examine the weapons allegedly used in the Las Vagas shooting.
And by the way, never forget that Donal Trump gave you the bump stock ban, and the corollary empowered ATF who now feels no compunction about making up law out of whole cloth – because Trump gave them permission to do it. Donald Trump owns the bump stock ban and the current ATF. It’s his. It belongs to him. It has his name on it.
I do wish that my name could be on this brief as a petitioner, but I never felt compelled to own a bump stock – until now so I could be on that brief.
His ego is incredible. He’s not stupid but so self-centered that he’s unwilling to learn; he’s an ignoramus. That’s not name-calling; it’s the correct term. Same with vaccines and shutting down the economy.
Former President Donald Trump defended his decision to unilaterally ban bump stocks, which he called “very unimportant,” during a CNN town hall on Wednesday night.
The Republican presidential primary frontrunner didn’t turn back on his support for the ban, which has since been found unconstitutional by two federal appeals courts. He said he consulted with the National Rifle Association (NRA) before issuing an order to the ATF to find a way to outlaw the devices. He said the group was supportive of his effort.
“As you know, the bump stocks are actually a very unimportant thing,” Trump said. “NRA I went with them, and they said, ‘it doesn’t mean anything, or actually all they do is teach you how to shoot very inaccurately.’ So, we did that.”
It’s a bill of accuracy.
Still, former President Trump defended his record on guns.
“There’s been nobody that’s protected the Second Amendment,” he said. “There’s, you know, like I have I protected through thick and thin, not easy to do.”
He later nods to Red Flag laws by bringing up “mental health.”
Always remember that you have Trump to thank for the bump stock ban, and the corollary empowered ATF making law out of whole cloth.
Just today, the Sixth Circuit struck down the bump stock ban. Two of the judges decided in favor of the plaintiffs because of the doctrine of lenity. I disagree with that. I think the law is very clear and adding a piece of plastic to a rifle doesn’t convert it to a machine gun under the statutory language. The third judge said it better.
But I would go further. As explained by Judge Murphy in Gun Owners of America, Inc. v. Garland, the best reading of the statute is that Congress never gave the ATF “the power to expand the law banning machine guns through [the] legislative shortcut” of the ATF’s rule at issue in this appeal, see Bump-Stock-Type Devices, 83 Fed. Reg. 66,514 (Dec. 26, 2018) (the Rule). See 19 F.4th at 910 (Murphy, J., dissenting). Simply put, under the statute as it currently reads, the addition of a bump stock to a rifle clearly does not make it a machinegun.
26 U.S.C. § 5845(b). Under this definition, a bump stock cannot be a machinegun part because a bump stock by itself cannot increase the rate of fire of a rifle, nor does it change the mechanics of a “single function of the trigger.”
