Many of us have thought of President Donald Trump’s ban on bump stocks as “his second-worst mistake after appointing Bill Barr.” What if we’ve been thinking about this all wrong, however? A prominent Constitutional attorney made an interesting admission on NBC News recently, after the Supreme Court struck down the bump stock ban in a June 14th ruling.
That comment has us rethinking whether Trump may have outsmarted all the gun-grabbers in both parties in Congress.
It was on October 1, 2017, when Stephen Paddock carried out the largest and weirdest mass shooting in US history. Trump had barely been in office for ten months. Paddock allegedly killed 58 people in Las Vegas and wounded more than 800 at a concert of mostly Trump supporters. We say “allegedly” because the FBI never produced any evidence that Paddock was the real shooter or if he was a patsy.
Twelve of the rifles found in Paddock’s hotel room had bump stocks installed. The FBI investigation into the shooting went nowhere. They claimed that they were never able to determine a motive. All the closest witnesses to Paddock’s hotel room who said anything that contradicted the FBI narrative had unfortunate fatal car crashes, unfortunate fatal falling off a cliff while hiking accidents, and unfortunate fatal vanishing from the face of the earth accidents. Like that poor bastard of a security guard who went on the Ellen DeGeneres show and was never seen or heard from again.
Anyway, congressional cries to ban bump stocks started pouring in, as expected. Gun-grabbers on both sides of the aisle wanted to ban these devices, which were invented to help handicapped people enjoy shooting sports. (Why do Democrats hate handicapped people so much?) Trump announced that he would “be looking into that over the next short period of time.”
A few months passed and the passion for a bump stock ban died down. Until the Parkland School shooting happened in Florida in February 2018. All of a sudden, the usual gun-grabbing suspects in Congress were at it again. They wanted to ban AR-15s as “weapons of war” and yadda yadda yadda. Opposition to a gun ban was in the minority in Congress at that point.
Two days after the Parkland shooting, President Trump ordered the ban on bump stocks via a regulation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE, or more commonly, the ATF). Everything quieted down after that. Both sides in Congress stopped calling for a legislative gun ban. President Trump had bailed them out because he was TAKING ACTION.
Here we are six years later, and the US Supreme Court struck down the bump stock regulatory ban in a 6-3 decision. The court ruled that bump stocks do not magically turn AR-15s into “machine guns.”
During an NBC News story on the Supreme Court decision, Constitutional attorney Mark Smith was asked about the situation. Here’s what he told NBC News:
“Former President Donald Trump didn’t really want to ban bump stocks. When he did, he knew the Supreme Court was likely to overturn his action. In a 6-3 decision Friday, that’s exactly what the justices did.”
I never thought of it that way before!
Trump had already appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court at that point. He appointed Brett Kavanaugh to the court in the summer of 2018. He later appointed Amy Coney Barrett in 2020. In just a few short years, we went from a Second Amendment hating progressive Supreme Court with a 5-4 liberal majority, to dominant originalist/textualist court with a 6-3 majority. We’ve seen a lot of great Supreme Court decisions since then, including the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
When President Trump ordered the gun stock ban via regulatory action, it immediately cooled the temperature in Congress and the media for a legislative gun ban. Regulations are much easier to get overturned than laws. Did President Trump outthink everyone, knowing that all he would have to do is wait and keep appointing conservative Supreme Court justices? That’s what Mark Smith is suggesting.
Maybe we should rethink our beliefs about President Trump’s bump stock ban. It worked out in the end and Congress didn’t pass a new gun ban. I’m still not changing my mind on Bill Barr, though.
