How much money did he get????

Clarence Thomas quotes former SF mayor in striking down gun control law

By Alec Regimbal

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas cited the late California Sen. and San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein in a Friday decision that overturned a federal ban on bump stocks. The court’s conservative supermajority ruled 6-3 to overturn a Trump-era ban from 2019 on a firearm attachment that essentially turns a semi-automatic weapon into a fully automatic one.

Thomas, writing the opinion for the majority, said that bump stocks don’t turn a weapon into a “machine gun” as defined under U.S. law, which means the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives overstepped its authority when it issued a rule in 2018 that said the opposite was true.

“ATF therefore exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies bump stocks as machineguns,” the ruling’s introduction says. 

Before 2018, the ATF did not consider weapons equipped with bump stocks to be machine guns, but reconsidered its stance at the behest of the Trump administration after a gunman — using rifles equipped with bump stocks —  killed 60 people and wounded hundreds more at a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017. Advocates for a federal ban, meanwhile, argued at the time that such a move should be done via legislation, saying that a simple rule change could be vulnerable to litigation.  

That’s exactly what happened on Friday, and Thomas noted in his ruling that Feinstein was one of the lawmakers who predicted it would. 

“ATF’s about-face drew criticism from some observers, including those who agreed that bump stocks should be banned,” Thomas wrote. “Senator Dianne Feinstein, for example, warned that ATF lacked statutory authority to prohibit bump stocks, explaining that the proposed regulation ‘hinge[d] on a dubious analysis’ and that the ‘gun lobby and manufacturers [would] have a field day with [ATF’s] reasoning’ in court.”

Conservative justices Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts joined Thomas in his ruling, while liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

Feinstein’s name appearing in a ruling that scaled back a meaningful gun control measure is ironic, considering the senator — who died in September — became famous for her support of firearm regulations during her decadeslong career. Her cardinal achievement on that front was authoring the 1994 federal assault weapons ban, which expired in 2004.  

She also had a personal connection to the event that led to the bump stock ban: She said her daughter had planned to attend the Route 91 Harvest music festival but ultimately decided against it. Feinstein also said her daughter had even planned to stay in the Mandalay Bay hotel, where the shooter fired on festivalgoers from a broken window. 

Bump stocks allow semi-automatic weapons to shoot faster, or at nearly the rate of a fully automatic machine gun. When the shooter holds their trigger finger down, the stock allows the weapon to bounce — or “bump” — back and forth rapidly between the shooter’s shoulder and trigger finger. The gunman at the Las Vegas festival fired more than 1,000 bullets into the crowd in a matter of minutes. 

“In just nine minutes, one individual was able to turn a concert venue into a battlefield,” Feinstein reportedly said in a press conference after the shooting. “One person, nine minutes, utter devastation.”

After the shooting, Feinstein introduced a bill that would ban bump stocks and other attachments that she said amounted to a “loophole” in the nation’s ban on machine guns. That bill and others like were never passed into law, and the issue was dropped after the ATF made its rule change. 

In his ruling, Thomas also noted that Feinstein said “legislation is the only way to ban bump stocks,” and in a separate opinion on Friday, Alito said the Las Vegas shooting gives Congress a reason to do just that. However, in a divided Congress, such a bill is unlikely to gain any traction.