After the slaughter at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017 and the slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, the Trump administration issued a ban on the use of bump stocks1 (which played a role in Las Vegas, but not in Parkland), in a rare moment of agreement among Democrats and Republicans.
The use of bump stocks is one of many gun-related issues traditionally kicked down the road by a combination of gun-lobbied legislatures and strict-reading judges in the United States.
On June 14, 2024 the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the bump stock ban (6-3) after considering a case that had been brought by a Texas gun shop owner in 2019 the day before the ban went into effect. Half of the overturning justices—Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett—were appointed by the president whose administration had issued the ban.
The New York Times pointed out that “The narrowly written decision was not a Second Amendment challenge. Rather, it is one of several cases this term seeking to undercut the power of administrative agencies” and that the “decision was a forceful rejection of one of the government’s few steps to address gun violence, particularly as legislative efforts have stalled in Congress. It also highlighted the deep divisions on the court as the country continues to grapple with mass shootings.”
In writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “A bump stock does not convert a semiautomatic rifle into a machine gun any more than a shooter with a lightning-fast trigger finger does.” Justice Samuel Alito concurred, writing that “there is simply no other way to read the statutory language.”
The Times report continues with Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires ‘automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.’ Because I, like Congress, call that a machine gun, I respectfully dissent.”
She continued, “Today, the court puts bump stocks back in civilian hands. To do so, it casts aside Congress’s definition of ‘machine gun’ and seizes upon one that is inconsistent with the ordinary meaning of the statutory text and unsupported by context or purpose.”
Justice Sotomayor pointed out that the majority opinion “looks to the internal mechanism that initiates fire, rather than the human act of the shooter’s initial pull,” in an interpretation that “requires six diagrams and an animation to decipher the meaning of the statutory text.”2
The arguments raised by the 100+ gun deaths a day3 in the United States include, but are not limited to, the sacralization of the 2nd Amendment; the tensions between individual freedoms and the common good; states rights versus the federal government; and gun and ammunition manufacturers’ shareholder dividends vs. public safety and collective trauma—this last one related to a handful of Republicans in Congress and the Supreme Court who continue to ignore the will of more than 60% of U.S. citizens, including some Republicans and gun owners, who want stricter gun safety legislation.
The linguistic and logical type of intelligence apparently required to become an attorney and Supreme Court Justice, which also used to be required to become a member of the U. S. Congress, may be necessary, and is definitely not sufficient, to serve in either position in the 3rd decade of the 21st century. There are other kinds of intelligence. Interpersonal. Intrapersonal. Musical. Visual-spatial. Moral. Kinesthetic. To name a few. We need human beings—more fully human beings—who are able to see and hold multiple perspectives and who are more interested in what is true than in winning one for their side to serve us.
On November 16, 2023 the Washington Post ran a story that shared post-mass shooting photographs and witness testimony from eleven slaughters that occurred between 2012 and 2023—including Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Marjory Stoneham Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas, Nevada. Knowing that some folks might find the photos and testimony disturbing, the Post’s editors shared what went into their decision to run the November 16 piece.
That some folks might find images of slaughter and the testimony of survivors disturbing makes sense, because slaughter is disturbing. Consider these lines from the poem “This Day Our Daily Dead”:
“…. We do not need our
passports, we need not travel beyond ourborders, giving ourselves this day our daily
dead as we do, rarely really seeing themthough, protected as we agree to be from the
truth of what we do and who we are.
….
…but our relentless refusalto look deeply at what’s disturbing is itself
disturbing. Our terrified turning away fromwhat is traps us ever more tightly in it, as if
that ever-growing malignancy will on its owndissipate and disappear if we make believe it’s
not there, even though we feel its pressurewithin our hearts every moment….”4
Considering this post in the context of the overarching theme of this newsletter and podcast—healing America’s narratives and owning and integrating the nation’s collective national Shadow—we see the Court’s ignorance of and/or arrogance toward the American people. While the argument can be made that the majority chose to put the responsibility for banning bump stocks back into Congress’s hands, the counter argument is that both the legislative and judicial branches continue a decades-long failure to act reasonably while U. S. citizens die every day. This is untrustworthy, has some grounding, at least in the legislature, in fear (of not getting reelected) and greed (the need for gun lobby money), and perpetuates the American culture of violence—and perhaps more specifically, the American “gun culture.”5
So, ignorant, arrogant, untrustworthy, fearful, greedy, and violent elements of the the federal government choose not to take steps that might help keep the citizenry safer. In 2018 we sent a copy of Killing America, the book in which “This Day Our Daily Dead” appears, to every member of Congress, the Supreme Court, the President, and the Vice President. A Democratic Congresswoman, a Republican Senator, and a female Supreme Court Justice acknowledged receipt of the book and expressed gratitude. In addition, Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, from Connecticut’s 3rd District, addressed the book’s content. You can read the letter here. Part of the final paragraph is cited below:
“As Members of Congress, one of our most sacred duties is to protect the American people. On that measure, we have failed—and doing nothing to change the current dynamic is both cowardly and shameful. Moving forward, you can be sure that I will support legislative initiatives that help to alleviate factors contributing to violence in America.”
Faced with protecting its citizens in 2024 and faced with protecting the “right to bear arms,” as it was understood and written in the late 1700s, what’s a beacon of democracy to do?
Recommendation: Read Richard Slotkin’s A Great Disorder (cited in note 5 below) for a brilliant exploration of the origins and effects of America’s national myths.
Something to Consider: To what extent do you hold America’s founding documents, The Declaration of Independence (a statement of revolution) and the Constitution (an experimental framework for a new nation) to be “sacred” documents or to be good starts to something that requires ongoing revision? Or something else entirely.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/10/04/us/bump-stock-las-vegas-gun.html?smid=pl-share
All of the justices quotes are from this source: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/us/politics/supreme-court-trump-gun-bump-stocks.html
Multiple sources are available. Here are a few: https://www.statista.com/statistics/258913/number-of-firearm-deaths-in-the-united-states/
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/center-for-gun-violence-solutions/research-reports/firearm-violence-in-the-united-states
https://everytownresearch.org/report/gun-violence-in-america/
Reggie Marra, “This Day Our Daily Dead,” Killing America: Our United States of Ignorance, Fear, Bigotry, Violence, and Greed, (From the Heart Press, 2018), 102.
Richard Hofstadter, “America as a Gun Culture,” American Heritage, October 1970, cited in Richard Slotkin, A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America, (Belknap-Harvard UP, 2024), 266.