Fire away: Supreme Court facilitates mass shootings with killer ruling on bump stocks | Opinion

If your day planner has an entry like this: “Go to packed entertainment event, kill as many innocent people as possible,” you’re in luck.

The U.S. Supreme Court has your back.

A majority of our so-called justices on Friday overturned a federal ban on “bump stocks,” an aftermarket accessory that allows a semi-automatic assault rifle to shoot more like a machine gun.

In 1949, Justice Robert H. Jackson established the legal precedent that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” It probably never crossed his mind that he should have included that it’s not a mass murder pact either.

Now, it’s both, thanks to the 6-3 majority that overturned an Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms regulation that banned bump stocks, after a disgruntled high-stakes gambler used multiple firearms equipped with them to rain hellfire down on a crowd of thousands as Jason Aldean played a street music festival in Las Vegas in 2017.

In a 10-minute period, 64-year-old Stephen Paddock fired an estimated 1,100 rounds. The final toll was 60 dead, more than 410 wounded.

The majority opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas is a triumph of legal technicality over wisdom and about as fatuous as any court ruling ever written.

To understand why, you need to understand a little bit about the difference between semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons.

Automatic weapons, aka machine guns, will continuously fire bullets as long as the trigger is held down. They’re common in the military, but for civilians, difficult and expensive to acquire.

Semi-automatic rifles — including AR-15s, AK-47s and various knockoffs — are generally legal for civilian use and easy to get. The difference from a full-auto weapon is that the gun fires only one round with each pull of the trigger.

Bump stocks are kind of an in-between. They allow the gun to move back and forth on a sliding tube, capturing the energy of the rifle’s recoil to repeatedly and rapidly fire the weapon.

To make it work, the shooter holds down the trigger and applies forward pressure on the gun’s front grip, allowing the rifle to move back and forth, cycling the action until the shooter releases the trigger or stops pushing forward on the front grip.

The bump stock has no legitimate civilian or military use. All it can do is throw a lot of lead in a general direction in a short amount of time.

Unlike a full-auto rifle, where the action takes place inside the gun, bump stocks rely on movement of the entire rifle. The need for forward pressure on the front grip makes it impossible to properly brace the firearm against the shooter’s shoulder for stability and control, so it’s just spray and pray.

That lack of accuracy makes it useless for hunting or target shooting. The only thing bump stocks are really useful for is pumping bullets into a crowd of defenseless people and killing them in case lots.

Even Donald Trump understands this. It was the ATF under his administration that banned the things after the Vegas massacre.

Justice Samuel Alito sided with the majority, but wrote a concurring opinion that makes a little more sense.

Congress banned machine guns in 1934, long before bump stocks were invented, so they weren’t covered by the letter of the law, he concluded.

As Alito wrote: “There can be little doubt that the Congress that enacted (the machine gun ban) would not have seen any material difference between a machinegun and a semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock. But the statutory text is clear, and we must follow it.”

He also offered us a way forward: “There is a simple remedy for the disparate treatment of bump stocks and machineguns. Congress can amend the law — and perhaps would have done so already if ATF had stuck with its earlier interpretation (before the Vegas shooting spree when bump stocks were legal). Now that the situation is clear, Congress can act.”

Alito’s right. The remedy is simple.

But echoing through my mind is this maxim from German general and strategist Carl Von Clausewitz: “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”

And Clausewitz never had to deal with our Congress.