Source: Leigh Vogel / Getty
A U.S. Supreme Court judge under renewed scrutiny for questionable ethics wrote a majority opinion on Friday striking down regulations for a gun mechanism used in a notorious mass shooting that makes a semiautomatic rifle shoot bullets more rapidly like a machine gun.
Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, whose integrity is being called into question over benefits he received from a billionaire political donor, penned the opinion in Garland v. Cargill, which centered on “bump stocks,” the device employed by a gunman who killed dozens of people in a brief period at a music festival in Las Vegas in 2017.
MORE: ‘Django’: MAGA World Is Furious Keith Ellison Compared Clarence Thomas To House Slave
Citing an apparent technicality, it was Thomas’ opinion in the Supreme Court’s conservative-led 6-3 decision that there is nothing illegal about using a bump stock on a semiautomatic rifle because it all depends on how the shooter pulls the trigger.
“A bump stock does not alter the basic mechanics of bump firing, and the trigger still must be released and reengaged to fire each additional shot,” Thomas wrote in part of his opinion.
In other words, Thomas said just because the gun can shoot more bullets and faster doesn’t mean the person shooting will use the gun in that manner.
Thomas later wrote that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “exceeded its statutory authority by issuing a Rule that classifies a bump stock as a ‘machinegun’.”
More from Thomas’ logic employed in his opinion:
A semiautomatic rifle equipped with a bump stock does not fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.” The phrase “function of the trigger” refers to the mode of action by which the trigger activates the firing mechanism. No one disputes that a semiautomatic rifle without a bump stock is not a machinegun because a shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot. And, any subsequent shot fired after the trigger has been released and reset is the result of a separate and distinct “function of the trigger.” Nothing changes when a semiautomatic rifle is equipped with a bump stock. Between every shot, the shooter must release pressure from the trigger and allow it to reset before reengaging the trigger for another shot. A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate “functions” of the trigger.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor cited the Las Vegas shooting in a dissent that undermined Thomas’ opinion.
“In murdering so many people so quickly, he did not rely on a quick trigger finger. Instead, he relied on bump stocks,” Sotomayor wrote in her dissent along with the Supreme Court’s two other liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Kentaji Brown Jackson.
The fact that Thomas wrote the majority opinion about a topic – guns – that is faithfully championed by Republicans is important because he has been facing credible accusations of corruption and bribery after it was disclosed he concealed years of receiving luxurious gifts from conservative billionaire Harlan Crow.
Even after a bombshell report from ProPublica last year eventually shamed Thomas into admitting the Republican megadonor lavished him and his family with gifts for decades, Congressional documents revealed this week showed that the Supreme Court justice still hadn’t been completely forthcoming and took even more trips on Crow’s private jet than he previously admitted.
A bump stock device (right), that fits on a semi-automatic rifle to increase the firing speed, making it similar to a fully automatic rifle, is shown next to an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle (left) at a gun store on October 5, 2017, in Salt Lake City, Utah. | Source: George Frey / Getty
Critics suspect Crow’s gifts have further compromised Thomas’ already-eroded sworn oath of impartiality, resulting in a series of controversial Supreme Court decisions hailed by Republicans.
That includes Thomas voting down the same affirmative action policies that sent him to law school and, more recently, suggesting that the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that racially integrated the nation’s segregated school system was the wrong things to do.
There are also suspicions that Thomas’ wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas – who also benefited from Crow’s gifts, including the funding of her life insurance policy – was involved in the effort to overturn the 2020 election based on a debunked conspiracy theory of election fraud trumpeted by Donald Trump and his faithful followers. Nearly two dozen text messages from Ginni Thomas sent to Trump’s Chief of Staff Mark Meadows appealing for him to “stand firm” against the 2020 election results were among the evidence revealed by the Jan. 6 Committee during its series of public hearings in 2022.
In addition, there’s evidence that Ginni Thomas cheered on the insurrectionists on Twitter, now X, after she attended the so-called “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, prior to violent protesters illegally storming the U.S. Capitol building.
Taken in totality, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the opinions of Ginni Thomas and Harlan Crow could influence Clarence Thomas’ Supreme Court decisions.
It was decidedly in that context that Clarence Thomas wrote the Supreme Court decision that bump stocks should be left federally unregulated until Congress enacts a law to do so.
This is America.
SEE ALSO:
Clarence Thomas Hires ‘Karen’ Accused Of Texting ‘I Hate Black People’ As His New Law Clerk
