The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it will hear Garland v. Cargill, a case that could legalize a device that allows an ordinary (and legal) semiautomatic firearm to mimic a fully automatic machine gun that can spew multiple bullets every second.
Cargill involves bump stocks, devices that use a gun’s recoil to repeatedly pull its trigger, allowing the gun to fire as many as 90 bullets in just 10 seconds. Bump stocks cause a gun’s trigger to buck against the shooter’s finger while the gun’s recoil makes it jerk back and forth, “bumping” the trigger and causing it to fire again and again.
In 2017, a gunman opened fire on a country music festival in Las Vegas, killing 60 people and wounding hundreds more. One reason this shooting was so deadly is that the shooter used a bump stock.
In response, the Trump administration concluded that these devices should not be legal, and it issued a regulation in 2018 that determined that bump stocks violate a 1986 federal law making it a crime to own a “machinegun.” But there’s a problem: The 1986 law is ambiguous, and federal courts are divided on whether it should be read to allow this ban on bump stocks.
Had this case arisen before former President Donald Trump remade the Supreme Court in the Federalist Society’s image, it would be a very easy one. The Court’s decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984) ordinarily requires judges to defer to a federal agency’s interpretation of a statute when that statute is ambiguous, and so Chevron would require judges to accept the Justice Department’s conclusion that bump stocks count as “machineguns.”
But the Trumpified Supreme Court plans to hear a case this term asking it to overrule Chevron. And the Court has already made clear, in cases applying its so-called “major questions doctrine,” that the judiciary has the power to veto regulations even when a federal statute unambiguously authorizes that regulation.
Which means…
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