Courting season

Bumping up against common sense

There is a kind of legal argument that only makes sense in a courtroom. They call it legal logic, or legal reasoning. For if you bring it out into the open air, into the real world, it makes no sense at all.

Such arguments might be laughable. But lawyers make their clients’ arguments when they have cases to make— even if they have to bend the world into a coat hanger in the process.

We got a laugh the other day reading news about the United States Supreme Court. Imagine that: a laugh! Who says it’s all musty and fusty and Clarence Thomas-y all the time?

The laugh came via a clearly unfunny case: The government wants to ban bump stocks, and a Texas gun dealer has challenged that ban.

For the uninitiated: The government—that is, We the People—banned machine guns years ago. Or nearly banned them. There are so many regulations on the blasted things that it takes nearly an act of Congress to keep one.

Those fully automatic weapons will fire all the rounds in a magazine with one pull of the trigger finger, or what the law calls “by a single function of the trigger.” The government made them extremely difficult to get (we don’t know a soul who owns one) after Al Capone & Co. shot up the world in the 1920s-30s. Now they are mostly limited to the military and movies.

Most guns you see these days operate on a “semi-automatic” mode, which means you have to pull the trigger each time you want to fire a shot. That includes most hunting weapons, the bedside pistol for home protection, and, yes, the devices used in most mass shootings in America.

Most of us discovered what th’ heck a “bump stock” was after the Las Vegas music festival shooting in October 2017. The device added to a semi-auto gun essentially makes the weapon fully auto—by moving the whole gun back and forth against the trigger finger, instead of forcing said finger to do all the work. Incredible what man will think of. Incredible, as in unbelievable.

So the question before the nation’s highest court: Does a bump stock transform a gun into a fully automatic one, which would kick in regulations meant to severely limit it? Or is it just an accessory to a normal gun, like a carrying strap?

Common sense says it’s not a carrying strap. A strap doesn’t allow for the firing of dozens of rounds with one squeeze of the trigger.

Court watchers and reporters say this conservative-leaning court, and its conservative-leaning judges, asked probing questions of the gun dealer’s attorneys the other day when arguments were heard.

Justice Samuel Alito: “Can you imagine a legislator thinking we should ban machine guns but we should not ban bump stocks?”

Justice Thomas: “This is a notion that bump stocks ‘does the exact same thing’ as machine guns. With that background, why shouldn’t we look at a broader definition of ‘function’?”

But the lawyers will make their arguments. As they should for their clients. Even when their clients are misguided.

“A bump-stock equipped rifle,” said the Texas gun dealer’s attorney to the justices, “can fire only one shot per function of the trigger because the trigger must reset after every shot and must function again before another shot can be fired.”

So it’s not the finger’s fault the trigger keeps bumping against it.

And besides, counsel advised the court, bump stocks could have other uses, like helping people with disabilities, you know, for people “who have arthritis in their fingers” or otherwise can’t fire a gun fast.

We’d advise the court members not to laugh too loud. This is serious business.

For his part, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said he worried about folks being afoul of the law if they don’t know about the government-enforced ban.

Somebody might suggest to Mr. Justice Kavanaugh that anybody who owns a bump stock knows exactly what the rules are. Such folks follow this more closely than the average bear. If the court says the government (starting with the Trump administration in 2018) is able to ban bump stocks, those folks at the shooting range will be the first to hear, and know.

Besides, when was the last time ignorance of the law was an excuse?

Here’s hoping common sense will overcome all the legal arguments on this issue. Congress can’t agree on what to have for lunch. A faulty, unreasoned, pretzel-shaped ruling that ignores all common sense on bump stocks could be deadly. For years.