“Intuitively, I am entirely sympathetic to your argument,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett told Brian Fletcher, the Justice Department lawyer defending a ban on devices that convert ordinary semiautomatic weapons into much more deadly guns capable of firing very rapidly, during a Supreme Court argument Wednesday morning.
That’s probably a good sign that Barrett, a conservative Trump appointee who sometimes breaks from her fellow Republican justices in gun cases, will uphold the ban on these devices, which are known as “bump stocks.”
Right now, lower courts are bitterly divided over whether an existing federal ban on “machineguns” is broad enough to encompass these bump stocks, with many (but not all) Republican appointees reading the ban narrowly, and many (but not all) Democratic appointees flipping in the other direction. Barrett asked a few questions that suggest she might break this partisan logjam and side with the judiciary’s more liberal faction in the process.
But Barrett and Chief Justice John Roberts, another Republican appointee who sometimes breaks with his party on guns, otherwise played their cards fairly close to their chests.
Roberts asked a few questions that suggest he is unsympathetic to the weaker of two arguments raised by Jonathan Mitchell, the lawyer attacking the ban, but the chief had little to say about Mitchell’s stronger argument. And Barrett’s questions largely dug into fairly granular details about how bump stocks function.
So, if you had to make a bet on how this case, known as Garland v. Cargill, will come down, you should bet on the bump stock ban being upheld. But you also shouldn’t have a very high level of confidence that your bet will pay off.
What, specifically, is this case about?
Federal law bans civilian ownership of “machineguns,” except in limited circumstances. It defines a “machinegun” to include “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot,…
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