The Bullets Count the Cost

Don't you shoot him down/
He's about to leave here/
Don't you shoot him down/
He's got to stay here/
He ain't going nowhere/
He's been shot down to the ground/
Oh where he can't survive no no...
-- "Machine Gun," Jimi Hendrix

The latest ruling out of this extremist, archconservative Supreme Court pretty much guarantees an increase in the national body count when it comes to gun violence. Via Amy Howe at SCOTUSblog:

The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a rule that banned bump stocks, issued by the Trump administration after a 2017 mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas. By a vote of 6-3, the justices rejected the federal government’s argument that rifles equipped with bump stocks are machine guns, which are generally prohibited under federal law. In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s conservative justices emphasized that Congress could have enacted a law that banned all weapons capable of high rates of fire, but it did not – and so the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives was wrong to interpret the federal ban on machine guns to extend to bump stocks.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented, in an opinion joined by the court’s other more liberal justices, Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She warned that the majority’s decision “will have deadly consequences.”

The bump stock is an attachment that transforms a semiautomatic rifle into a weapon that can discharge at a rate of hundreds of rounds per minute. The Trump administration issued the rule at the center of the case in 2018. It followed a mass shooting at a music festival in Las Vegas in which the gunman used semi-automatic rifles equipped with a bump-stock device to kill 60 people and injure over 500 more. The rule, which concluded that bump stocks are machine guns, was an about-face from the ATF’s previous position, which until 2018 had indicated that only some kinds of bump stocks are machine guns. Under the 2018 rule, anyone who owned a bump stock was required to destroy it or drop it at a nearby ATF office to avoid criminal penalties...

Rather than leave it up to the federal agency to determine that bump stocks turned semi-auto guns into full-auto, Thomas and the other Republican Justices decided "fuck public safety, let the gun nuts have their firepower."

Because that's what was at stake here. Not a Second Amendment matter, but a public safety matter. And the goddamn Far Right don't give a rat's ass as long as they're not the targets (you will notice that a lot of the Far Right public gatherings are "Gun Free Zones").

If you want an idea of what a bump stock can do for an assault rifle, there's a YouTube clip going around that demonstrates (try to get to the 4:42 mark):

With a bump stock, you're shooting enough bullets to wipe out an entire room of people within seconds, not minutes. The Las Vegas concert mass shooting that convinced the ATF (and even a gun-happy trump administration) to ban bump stocks? The gunman was able to get off 1,000 rounds, killing 60 and wounding over 400 people (more people were also injured during the panicked fleeing).

Goddamn this. A solid majority of Americans want assault rifles banned, and yet our legal system - and far too many politicians bought out by the goddamned NRA - refuses to consider that need.

Gun violence is already a serious epidemic in our nation. Mass shootings are now so common that we don't even notice them unless the body count goes into double digits. By giving these gunmen the ability to do that, we are guaranteeing that the blood in our streets will not stop flowing. Not until every gun-loving politicians (mostly Republicans) are voted out of office, not until every gun-loving judges are forced to retire, not until we can do something about the twisted side of the American debate on guns that turned the Second Amendment from granting states the power to well-regulate their militias into a mindless license for gun nuts to shoot anybody they want.

The violence is going to get worse. Especially when the Far Right gun nuts get convinced the upcoming election isn't going their way...