A Supreme Court victory for the pro-deathers

One Saturday in the fall of 2017, I was in a remote area of Maryland, surrounded by water and woods, a place so quiet that even the squawk of a blue jay seemed startling.

In the early afternoon, we heard gunfire — and not the single, distinct shots you might hear during deer season, but rapid-fire bursts of 10 to 15 rounds at a time. It sounded like someone taking target practice with a semi-automatic handgun or rifle. And I say that despite the speed of the rounds: It was hard to imagine anyone so quickly squeezing off each shot, which is what is required with semi-automatic firearms.

My companion on the trip, a guy who owns guns, hunts and shoots clays, said the sound was from an automatic weapon — that is, a rifle set up like a machine gun, capable of firing multiple rounds with a single squeeze of the trigger. “Too fast to be semi-automatic,” he said.

Such arms were banned for civilian use decades ago, but it’s not hard to imagine someone getting one and using it on private property in a sparsely populated area. 

Or in Las Vegas.

Ever heard the recording of gunfire from the 32d floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel-casino in Las Vegas? It sounded just like what my friend and I had heard on that Saturday in the distant woods — but, of course, on an obscene scale.

Sixty-four-year-old Stephen Paddock fatally shot 60 concertgoers with long sprays of gunfire — up to 800 rounds per minute — that left another 413 people wounded. The ensuing panic brought the total number of injured to 867. It was the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history.

Paddock used a rifle rigged up with a bump stock that turned his rifle into a machine gun. Bump stocks were banned in 2018. On Friday, the gun-crazy Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a twisted opinion saying the ban was unconstitutional because it did not precisely fit the criteria for a machine gun that Congress made law 90 years ago. The court’s conservative super majority agreed, and now bump stocks are legal again.

“Thomas’ majority opinion reads like the fevered work of a gun fetishist, complete with diagrams and even a GIF,” writes Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, who, with Dahlia Lithwick, provide excellent coverage of the worst Supreme Court since before the Civil War.

The Supreme Court has virtually no credibility with the public these days, and will have none for years to come — as long as Thomas and the equally unethical, married-to-MAGA Sammy Alito remain in robes. It’s one thing to decry the way those two men have been compromised — Thomas with bribes from wealthy conservatives, Alito with his zealous Catholicism and his insurrection-supporting wife — and their refusal to recuse themselves from cases involving Trump. Now, they and other conservatives, including the supposedly stabilizing Chief Justice Roberts, have joined in making American citizens even more vulnerable to mass shootings. It’s absolute insanity.

And among the many roots of this insanity are the people who sued to make bump stocks legal; they are of a group even worse than the NRA that way, according to David Pucino, an expert in firearms law and legal director of the Giffords Law Center.

Those who push for every gun possible, every gun freedom possible — despite all the death and injury caused by guns every year in the U.S. — these are the most dangerous, selfish Americans because their incessant crusades and many legal victories empower crazies with weapons and endanger the rest of us. As another Fourth of July approaches, consider what MAGA Americans — with their votes for Trump — have allowed to happen in the name of freedom. 

Freedom is a glittery ideal we talk about at big American moments. It’s a beautiful idea.

But where’s the freedom in the worry about getting shot at a concert or prayer service or block party?

Where’s the freedom in wondering if the guy who just flipped you the bird in traffic keeps a handgun in his car?

Where’s the freedom in young parents worrying about the threat of a mass shooting at their kids’ elementary school?

Votes for Trump made a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court for a generation. The Trump court has deprived women of the right to choose to have an abortion, giving a victory to pro-lifers, and now lifted the ban on bump stocks, giving a victory to the pro-deathers. It’s insane.