Why not ban bump stocks?

A woman pauses while looking at some of the 58 white crosses honoring the victims of a Sunday night mass shooting on the south end of the Las Vegas Strip on Oct. 5, 2017, in Las Vegas. staff file

If a device allows a semiautomatic firearm to operate like a machine gun and to kill indiscriminately like a machine gun, the average person would not only call it a machine gun, they’d call for it to be banned. Yet a majority of the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t guided by such common sense. And so the question remains in the wake of Friday’s 6-3 ruling striking down a federal ban on bump stocks: What happens next?

Most Americans may not be familiar with bump stocks. They are an add-on that essentially allows the trigger to be pulled in rapid succession allowing a stream of cartridges to be fired. The firing speed approaches that of a machine gun, a device prohibited for civilian use since the mid-1930s. Yet that’s not how a half-dozen justices see them. Relying on a strict interpretation of the law — essentially that the trigger still has to be pulled, which is not precisely how a machine gun works — the majority threw out regulations that have been on the books since (wait for it) Donald Trump was president of the United States.

Justice Samuel Alito suggests that Congress need only amend federal law to ban bump stocks so this isn’t a Second Amendment problem, it’s apparently a technicality problem. Yet one can’t help but notice that the current divided Congress isn’t really big on passing gun safety measures. Does anyone really believe that Republicans will rally behind this effort? Then-President Trump only endorsed it because the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting in which 58 people died and more than 500 were injured at a music festival was fresh on the public’s mind. It’s entirely possible he was counting on the Supreme Court to eventually overturn it and keep the pro-gun crowd happy.

Maryland bans bump stocks under a 2018 law and, as the Supreme Court passed on a chance to overturn it a few years back, it’s probably sticking around (as will similar bans in the District of Columbia and 14 other states). But that’s small comfort given how easy it would be to buy one elsewhere and haul it across state lines. One can be purchased for as little as $100. Will anyone on the court express regret if one is used in the next mass shooting? Will a do-nothing Congress?