Trump and Bump Stocks: Shrewd Stratedy or Fortuitous Improvisation?

On October 1, 2017, a mass murderer killed 58 people by firing at them from an elevated position in Las Vegas. Over 800 were injured. Stephen Paddock was found, an apparent suicide on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel. He had a reported 23 firearms, of which 12 had bump stocks installed. In the audio recordings of the event, the firing sound much like automatic weapons fire.

President Trump had been in office less than ten months. The calls for immediate legislation to ban bump stocks, the details of which included bans on virtually all semi-automatic firearms, were loud. Congressional resistance to the media onslaught existed, but were in the minority.  The NRA called for the ATF to study the situation, and remedy it with regulation if necessary. President Trump said he would consider regulation. From factcheck.org:

Several days after the shooting, Trump was asked if bump stocks should be banned, and he vowed his administration would “be looking into that over the next short period of time.”

The NRA seemed supportive of the idea. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre and NRA political strategist Chris Cox issued a statement  saying, “The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semiautomatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.”

The New York Times, a reliably far left promoter of ever more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, published this on November 8, 2017:

But the proposed ban on bump stocks, once hailed as a modest step toward bipartisan compromise on gun safety, may be turning into a cautionary tale of how energetic intentions in the wake of mass shootings can dissipate quickly. As attentions moved elsewhere, the N.R.A. turned against action, and Republican lawmakers decided the devices would be someone else’s problem: the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or A.T.F.

“Right now everyone’s in a holding pattern, because some people around here have hope that A.T.F. will bail us out,” said Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida, who has co-sponsored a bipartisan measure to ban bump stocks.

Less than six weeks after the massacre, the wind was gone from the push for a comprehensive ban. 

About five months later, on February 18, 2018, a deranged former student from a Parkland, Florida High School, mass murdered 11 people and injured 13 more. He was able to do so because of numerous botched responses to his actions before and during the commission of the crimes.  More calls for gun bans were immediate in the media.

On February 20, 2018, President Trump ordered the bump stock ban via regulation.

Effectively, President Trump nullified two major pushes for laws restricting rights protected by the Second Amendment, with one call for regulatory change. 

The bump stock change was predicted to be immediately challenged in the courts.

On December 18, 2018, the ATF finalized the bump stock rule.

On December 19, 2018, Senator Dianne Feinstein complained:

But let’s not celebrate too quickly. Presidents can rescind regulations just as easily as they create them, and in this case, the bump stock ban will likely be tied up in court for years. Only hours after the Trump administration released its final regulation, Gun Owners of America announced it would file a lawsuit.

On April 22, 2019, this correspondent noted that challenging a regulation had a much greater chance of success than challenging legislation.

On Friday, June 14, 2024, the Supreme Court struck down the ATF Final Rule on bump stocks, ruling the ATF exceeded the authority given it by Congress.

Whether by design or fortuitous improvisation, the Trump administration delivered a defeat to two major attempts to pass restrictions on rights protected by the Second Amendment. Mark Smith, Constitutional attorney and contributor at AmmoLand believes it was by design. Mark Smith is joined by nbcnews.com:

Former President Donald Trump didn’t really want to ban bump stocks. When he did, he knew the Supreme Court was likely to overturn his action.

In a 6-3 decision Friday, that’s exactly what the justices did.

From further on in the nbcnews.com article:

Trump found a third option that lowered the temperature on the gun-control debate in the short term — robbing momentum from congressional efforts to ban bump stocks — and kicked the issue to a conservative-leaning Supreme Court.

The originalist and textualist Supreme Court did not exist when President Trump made the executive decision on bump stocks. Over the next several years, the political and judicial landscape changed significantly in favor of rights protected by the Second Amendment.

Justice Kavanaugh was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2018.

Justice Barrett was appointed by President Trump in 2020.

The Supreme Court was changed from a mixed “progressive” court in 2017 to an originalist/textualist court in 2020.

The seminal Supreme Court case of Bruen was decided in June of 2022, and the move to restore the separation of powers in the three branches of government, by reining in the administrative bureaucracies, was started in 2020 by curtailing the power of the EPA in West Virginia v EPA.

From 2017 to 2024, the private stock of firearms in the USA was increased from 418 to 508 million.

The NSSF says over 22 million people became new gun owners during that period.

Was the decision to use the ATF to ban bump stocks a strategic choice by the NRA and President Trump? Was it simply a fortuitous improvisation?

It is highly likely the bump stock final rule had significant, positive results in the restoration of rights protected by the Second Amendment.

Sometimes a strategic retreat is required to win the battle or win the war.

©2024 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice and link are included.

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