This is downright embarrassing. The U.S. Supreme Court was just taught an important lesson.
As the Supreme Court’s liberal Justices got schooled by this top conservative lawyer.
Is there a more iconic duo than Democrats, liberals, and Leftists talking out of the side of their mouths on topics they have no clue about? Maybe peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but it’s a close match for sure.
Nothing exemplifies this reality more than when Democrats try to wax on about “common sense gun control” and “gun safety” laws that they want passed in every state across the country and in the U.S. legislature.
Democrats are constantly talking about how “dangerous” guns like AR-15s and AK-47s are and how they have no business being in the hands of an everyday American. Of course, they ignore the fact that all rifles (not even just the AR-15 platform alone) account for just a tiny fraction of the overall gun violence in America.
The vast majority of gun violence in the States is with the humble Glock or any other standard 9mm handgun. Democrats don’t go after those simple guns of course, because they aren’t as “scary” as an AR-15 and they know that they won’t have any progress if they come out and say they want to ban basically all guns.
The liberal hive mind’s ignorance on this topic was put on full display recently as a sitting U.S. Supreme Court Justice had to be taught basic facts about a gun accessory that has been facing scrutiny in recent years.
While arguing before the Supreme Court on Wednesday, the lawyer fighting a ban on bump stocks that was enacted under Trump’s administration, constantly had to correct the liberal justices on how semi-automatic weapons function.
The liberal justices often brought up the idea that a semi-automatic may “functionally” shoot like an automatic weapon due to a bump stock, which allows it to match the speed of a machine gun. According to Jonathan Mitchell, the attorney for Michael Cargill, a U.S. Army veteran who fought the prohibition, the real issue is not the speed but the trigger’s functioning.
“It’s factually incorrect to say that a function of the trigger automatically starts some chain reaction that propels multiple bullets from the gun,” Mitchell informed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “A function of the trigger fires one shot, then the shooter must take additional manual action.”
The Trump administration passed a ban on bump stocks after the 2017 mass shooting at a Las Vegas concert. The ban was enforced by expanding the definition of “machine gun” in a federal law that prohibits the transfer or possession of machine guns to include bump stocks. This interpretation is challenged in the case of Garland v. Cargill. Mitchell stated that the government’s reasoning is flawed for two reasons: first, a bump stock does not transform a handgun into an automatic weapon, and second, it does not alter the way the trigger works to permit multiple shots from a single operation.
Justice Jackson asks why the NFA doesn't ban guns that can fire as fast as machine guns. Cargill says because that's not what the law says
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) February 28, 2024
At one point, liberal Justice Kagan seemed to argue that she doesn’t even care about the way the law is written and that she cares more about how she thinks the law should be applied in this case.
“Anything that takes just a little human action to produce more than one shot” was intended to be restricted, Justice Elena Kagan asserted.
“That’s just not the way they wrote the statute,” Mitchell responded. With a bump stock, he explained that the trigger still needs to reset every shot, and there is only one shot fired for each function of the trigger.
“I view myself as a good textualist,” Kagan replied. “But textualism is not inconsistent with common sense. A weapon that fires a multitude of shots with a single human action, whether it’s a continuous pressure on a conventional machine gun, holding the trigger, or a continuous pressure on one of these devices on the barrel — I can’t understand how anybody could think those two things should be treated differently.”
Justice Sotomayor picked up where Kagan left off and tried to grill attorney Mitchell by asking him why anyone would need to “shoot 400 to 700 or 800 rounds of ammunition under any circumstance.”
The fact that the liberal Justices got dangerously close to completely disregarding the law as it’s written is frightening, to say the least.
The matter at hand is the law itself. We’re not dealing with a constitutional statute that was written hundreds of years ago and now has to be interpreted one way or another.
No, this is a law that Congress has every right to add on to as they see fit. To legislate from the bench by twisting the law into your favor is antithetical to what the judicial branch is supposed to do.
On the plus side, the conservative Justices on the bench were more skeptical of the idea that the bump stocks should be banned on the merits of this one law alone. Justice Neil Gorsuch expressed concerns that this law was being abused to turn hundreds of thousands of law-abiding Americans into felonious criminals overnight.
Stay tuned to the DC Daily Journal.
