Senate Anti-Gunner Tries To Resurrect Potential Semi-Auto Ban

Right on schedule, four days after Democrats lost in the Supreme Court.

As I mentioned yesterday (and so did many others), on Friday, in Garland v. Cargill, the Supreme Court upheld the decision of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Cargill v. Garland, that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATFE), in a recent rule, erred in declaring that a non-mechanical bump stock is a “machinegun” as defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA).

Also yesterday, not surprisingly, U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) requested the Senate to approve, by unanimous consent, S. 1909, an anti-gun bill he introduced a year ago. Fortunately, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-Neb.) blocked the move.

To prepare to understand what S. 1909 proposed, remember that Democrats—being Marxists determined to destroy society as we have known it all these years—lie about everything, gun-related and otherwise. And they want civilians disarmed, therefore unable to resist Democrat tyranny. And, unlike many conservative Americans and Republicans in Congress, they work hard because they want to win.

Just as wicked Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) dishonestly named her anemic 1994 “assault weapon ban” the “Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act” (emphasis added), Heinrich named S. 1909 the “Banning Unlawful Machinegun Parts Act” (BUMP Act).

Of course, the bill didn’t propose only to ban bump stocks. It proposed to ban the possession of:

“(A) any manual, power-driven, or electronic device primarily designed, or redesigned, so that when the device is attached to a semiautomatic firearm the device—

“(i) materially increases the rate of fire of the firearm; or

“(ii) approximates the action or rate of fire of a machinegun;

“(B) any device, part, or combination of parts, that is designed and functions to materially increase the rate of fire of the firearm, by eliminating the need for the operator of the firearm to make a separate movement for each individual function of the trigger; or

“(C) a semiautomatic firearm that has been modified in any way that—

“(i) materially increases the rate of fire of the firearm; or

“(ii) approximates the action or rate of fire of a machinegun.

Possession of such a device, parts, or semi-automatic firearm would have been a felony, unless the item(s) was/were possessed prior to the bill becoming law and registered with the BATFE under the provisions of the National Firearms Act, as if it were a “machinegun.”

Notice that S. 1909 did not objectively define “materially,” “approximates,” or “rate of fire,” and it did not state what it meant by “approximates the action . . . of a machinegun.” The latter was particularly dangerous, because a semi-automatic “approximates” the action of a machine gun to the extent that both use the energy of a fired round of ammunition to eject a fired cartridge case and chamber another round, a fact noted by the Supreme Court in Cargill.

On Sunday, two days before Heinrich tried to slip his bill through the Senate, Stephen Halbrook predicted something of the sort. Steve, whom I’ve had the privilege to know since 1991, when I began working for the NRA’s political division, is America’s foremost Second Amendment and a significant Fourteenth Amendment scholar too, cited by the Supreme Court three times in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), in overturning the District’s 1976 handgun ban, and six times in McDonald v. Chicago (2010), in overturning Chicago’s 1982 handgun ban and declaring handgun bans unconstitutional nationwide. As a litigator, he has also won in firearm cases before the Supreme Court. In other words, if you want to know what’s what, where the Second Amendment, Fourteenth Amendment, and related laws are concerned, Steve’s books and law review articles are where you begin.

On Reason.com, Steve predicted bills—like S. 1909—“will go much further than just to ban bump stocks.” He noted that “Senator Feinstein’s (earlier) S. 1916 certainly did—it would have banned getting a match trigger job that would make the trigger lighter, and thus able to fire faster.” So would have Heinrich’s S. 1909.

Steve added, “Whatever the future holds, Cargill sets a good omen that the Court won't be beholden to the administrative state and will follow Chief Justice Marshall’s words: ‘It is emphatically the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is.’”

Supreme Court justices ain’t gun experts

While on the topic, there are a couple of points of contention in the Supreme Court’s Cargill decision to note.

On page 8 of the decision, the Court says that in an AR-15, “The disconnector is the component responsible for resetting the hammer to its original position after a shot is fired.” That is incorrect. Yes, when a shot is fired, the bolt-carrier assembly moves rearward, pushing the hammer rearward. And yes, the disconnector then grabs the hammer, to prevent it from flying forward to fire another round. But that does not place the hammer in its pre-firing, cocked, “original position.”

Once the trigger is released, the disconnector releases the hammer, which flies forward a short distance, where the hammer gets locked in its “original position” by the top, front edge of the trigger, called the “sear.”

Also, on pages 14-15, the Court says that the NFA’s “machinegun” definition “specifies the precise action that must ‘automatically’ cause a weapon to fire ‘more than one shot’—a ‘single function of the trigger.’ If something more than a ‘single function of the trigger’ is required to fire multiple shots, the weapon does not satisfy the statutory definition.”

And on page 17, the Court says, “many weapons have some ‘automatic’ features. For example, semiautomatic rifles eject the spent cartridge from the firearm’s chamber and load a new one in its place without any input from the shooter. A semiautomatic rifle is therefore ‘automatic’ in the general sense that it performs some operations that would otherwise need to be completed by hand.”

No. The first statement misses the point of how an M16—the automatic-capable rifle from which the semi-automatic-only AR-15 is derived—achieves automatic fire. The second statement incorrectly treats “automatic” and “semi-automatic” as somewhat synonymous terms because both types of firearms eject a fired case and chamber another round without manual input of the rifleman. Instead, the operational difference articulated by the terms “automatic” and “semi-automatic” is in how the rifle fires.

An M16 can fire automatically—one shot after another, continuously—not merely because of a “single function of the trigger,” but because its trigger, hammer, disconnector, and selector have different shapes and dimensions than those of an AR-15, and it has an “automatic sear,” which an AR-15 doesn’t have, and which is too wide to fit within an AR-15’s lower receiver. These differences are by design; AR-15s would not have been allowed to be sold as semi-automatics for the last 60 years unless those parts had physical differences preventing them from enabling automatic fire.

Here’s why an M16 can fire automatically.

When the M16’s selector is set to automatic, and the trigger is pulled to initiate firing, holding the trigger to the rear prevents the disconnector from locking the hammer when the latter is pushed rearward. (The disconnector plays a role only in semi-automatic firing, whether by an M16 or an AR-15.)

However, the hammer gets locked rearward, to prevent it from flying forward to fire the rifle again, by the automatic sear. The automatic sear does this for only a miniscule fraction of a second—just long enough for the bolt carrier assembly to return forward and lock the bolt into the rifle’s barrel extension—“in battery”—so that the rifle is safe to fire. As the bolt locks in place, the automatic sear releases the hammer, so that it can fly forward to fire the rifle again.

This happens with no input from the rifleman, which is why it’s automatic. “Automatic” means that the rifle does everything required to fire, by itself if you tell it to by holding down the trigger. Consider the difference between an automatic and a manual transmission in a vehicle. Keep your foot on the gas, and an automatic transmission will run through the gears by itself.

Ironically, Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—in Sotomayor’s otherwise laughable dissent, probably written for her by one of the civilian disarmament activist groups—got this right, where the majority in Cargill did not. The three leftist justices said, “An internal mechanism automates the M16’s continuous fire. . . .” (Emphasis added.)

Lastly, Sen. Heinrich posted this in support of his bill:

Bravo, Sen. Heinrich, for being the rare Democrat to (probably unintentionally) indicate support for the right of people to have firearms for self-defense. And since there is a self-defense application for automatic rifles, such as the M16, short-barreled rifles, and sound suppressors—particularly for the purposes articulated by Article 1, Section 8, Clause 15 of the Constitution and contemplated by the Second Amendment—if Heinrich can get his fellow Democrats to support repealing 18 USC 922(o); amending 26 USC 5845 to remove rifles from the NFA’s “machinegun” definition and removing short-barreled rifles, and “silencers” from the NFA entirely; and forever stop whining about semi-automatic rifles and >10-round magazines, he will probably get his wish on bump stocks. That’s because with those amendments having been made, people will likely throw their bump stocks into their plastic-recycling garbage cans.

Copyright © Mark Overstreet 2024