Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) expressed concerns on Sunday about legislation enshrining the Trump-era ban on bump stocks, suggesting it “treads close to the line” of violating the Second Amendment. This follows the Supreme Court’s recent reversal of that prohibition.
During an appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Cotton emphasized, “On the legislative question, I would suggest before we infringe on the rights of law-abiding American citizens, we should crack down on violent crime, gun crimes.”
When asked if he believes a bump stock ban would violate the Second Amendment, Cotton responded, “I think it could.”
He added, “It treads close to the line. You’d want to look at the legislative language, but more than anything, what we need to do to stop crime in this country is to get tough on crime.”
Cotton praised the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday, which invalidated the prohibition on bump stocks—devices that convert semiautomatic weapons into ones capable of firing hundreds of rounds per minute.
He highlighted the decision as an example of the court not engaging in outcome-based judging.
The ban had originally been implemented under former President Trump, and the 6-3 ruling was divided along ideological lines.
“What you saw on Friday was the opposite of that. You saw the six Republican-appointed justices reversing a Trump administration regulation. That’s the opposite of an outcomes-based judging. They focused on the text and the meaning of statutes and of our Constitution, exactly as they should,” Cotton said.
The Biden administration had defended the regulation in front of the high court after the Trump administration first implemented it following the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history.
The shooter used guns equipped with bump stocks to kill 60 people and wound hundreds of others.
Both the Trump and Biden administrations have since made possessing bump stocks a criminal offense by having the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives classify them as machine guns under long-standing federal law.
The problem with labelling the devices as a means to “convert” legal firearms into illegal firearms, is that it doesn’t actually change the action of the firearm, but the person.
There are ways to make semiautomatic firearms into automatic firearms, like creating an “auto sear” which enables the weapons to fire continuously while holding down the trigger.
Bump stocks, on the other hand, are a cosmetic addition to a firearm that aids the shooter in pulling the trigger faster.
Why does this matter?
Because US law defines a machine gun as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.”
While an auto sear would allow for more than one shot to be discharged with the single pull of a trigger, a bump stock requires the trigger to be acted upon for each shot.
By the federal government’s own definition, bump stocks do not make weapons a machine gun.
But it all falls to the court’s interpretations.
Stay tuned to the Fairview Gazette.
