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dethb0y ,

Our tax dollars: At Work. This litigation’s costing a fortune and basically comes down to a technical detail of the wording of a requirement in the law.

You’d think the government would have better things to spend it’s time and resources on than this.

CmdrShepard ,

Yeah, it’s a waste of time if we ignore statistics like the leading cause of death for children being gun violence. A line has to be drawn somewhere with every law and I don’t see any real justification for why this mod outweighs the lives of all the kids who will die in the next school shooting. Is being able to shoot a couple extra clay pigeons for ‘sport’ worth it at that cost?

Birrags ,

Imo, this seems like an extremely reasonable thing for the government to spend money on. It would have been better if they had worded the law better in the first place. But after the lawsuits we will know either way if that type of device is legal or not.

JustZ ,

This post is idiotic. Interpretung statutes is literally an agency’s job.

ThrowawayPermanente ,

Cone on man, of course they fucking are. -Signed, a 2nd amendment fundamentalist

theyoyomaster OP ,

I mean, a machine gun is a legal term that they do not meet the definition of, so there’s that.

StarServal ,
@StarServal@kbin.social avatar

There’s the letter of the law and then there’s the spirit of the law. What was the law made for?

I think the idea of banning fully automatic weapons was to make it more difficult to have a high rate of firing. All of these automatic adjacent fixes are skirting the letter of the law, in spite of the spirit of the law.

theyoyomaster OP , (edited )

The spirit of the law is to ban machine guns, not set a subjective and arbitrary “firing rate” for semi automatics. You can achieve the same effect with any semi auto by just holding your beltloop. The only argument for it meeting the “spirit” of the law was that the NFA was a brazen attempt to skirt the 2nd Amendment and the goal was to ban as much as they could without it being thrown out, so this does sorta fit in with that, but not really.

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

"At least... it wasn't... a machine gun" - last words of a five year old killed by one of these.

God bless America.

theyoyomaster OP ,

I mean, they really aren’t used in crime in any appreciable way. Criminals just modify/use real machine guns. The law in question doesn’t even apply to felons, only legal gun owners can be charged with it.

SheeEttin ,

That’s not exactly true. There are quite a few Glocks with illegally-installed full-auto switches, making them illegal machine guns. Those are definitely used in crime, mostly gang violence I think, at least based on the news reports of seizures I’ve seen.

theyoyomaster OP ,

That is exaxtly what I was referring to. FRTs aren’t what are turning up at crime scenes. When you’re committing murder, the majority of which is gang related, you don’t bother with expensive work around; you just put a switch in your Glock and call it a day. It also helps that felons and minors can’t be charged with a crime under the NFA for possession of a machine gun like a switched Glock.

I’m not going to say that they have never been used in a crime because nothing is absolute, but they are definitely a niche and rare even outside the context of crimes. I would be very surprised if there has actually been a case of “a 5 year old” getting murdered with one like the other guy suggested. I feel like it’s both extremely unlikely statistically and something that would have generated massive media coverage.

SheeEttin ,

If they wanted to ban any device that enabled firing more than N rounds per minute, they could have.

commandar ,

There’s the letter of the law and then there’s the spirit of the law.

Only the former should be legally enforceable. If you start enforcing the latter regardless of the former, the legal system stops being about rule of law and more about the subjective whims of those enforcing it.

If the letter of the law doesn't capture the intent, then the law needs to change, but laws shouldn't be subjectively enforced on the basis of what someone feels like they should mean rather than what they actually say.

Astroturfed ,

You sound like someone who would date a child, but it’s fine because you didn’t do anything sexual until it was legal.

Dark_Arc ,
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Weird example…

Astroturfed ,

But it’s totally legal by the letter of the law! See, it’s a really stupid fucking argument now isn’t it?

agitatedpotato ,

He doesn’t sound like a republican to me.

Astroturfed ,

Guy defending making a weapon near fully automatic to skirt the letter of the law, not republican? Sounds pretty Republican.

agitatedpotato ,

The dude didn’t even speak about weapons in his comment, he simply said the judicial branch isn’t supposed to enforce laws based on what they should have been written but as they are. It’s the fault of the legislative branch that the only legislation they have to tackle this problem is from the 1930s, but that doesn’t mean the courts are allowed to enforce what law should mean when it’s written in a legally explicit way, that’s a form of legislation from the bench. All of that is simply just how the judicial branch works, it seemed to me much more an explanation than a defense.

commandar ,

Chiming back in here to say that yes, that was exactly my point.

To maybe make it a little clearer, a hypothetical: imagine a Republican-controlled state enacts a law banning late term abortions and makes it punishable with jail time for women to receive one.

That hypothetical law includes a clause defining a late term abortion as one taking place at any time past 37 weeks from conception.

A woman has an abortion at 36 weeks pregnant. Anti-abortion activists insist that she should be culpable under the law; an abortion at 36 weeks is functionally the same as an abortion at 37 weeks and 36 weeks is very obviously late term pregnancy, they claim.

If the local sheriff then arrests that woman, is the sheriff behaving lawfully?

That's why the government being bound to the letter of the law is so incredibly important. A law can be stupid, harmful, regressive, or otherwise bad in any number of ways, but if the government must act within the law as written, then at least we know what rules we're playing by and can work to change them.

If the government is allowed to arbitrarily and capriciously ignore the letter of the law in favor of what the people enforcing it wish the law were, that will be abused by bad actors. That sort of thing is more or less a universal component of authoritarianism.

tl;dr - we shouldn't do it because allowing it will allow it to be used against us.

Dark_Arc , (edited )
@Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg avatar

Only the former should be legally enforceable.

If the law says you can’t kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?

Humans are a (I’ll give you flawed) part of the system for good reason, and it isn’t so the exact letter of the law can be enforced. The point should always be to understand what the law is trying to accomplish, and enforce that in the most consistent and unsurprising way possible.

This is necessary even when the exact letter of the law is spelled out because times change, and it’s unreasonable to expect every law to be updated for every edge case. Airplanes aren’t driven into anybody, but they’re piloted. “Your honor, I did not drive into my ex-wife, I flew into my ex-wife, which the law says nothing about!”

Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances… in other words shit happens. Should a person who stole a car to chase after a burglar be punished the same as someone who stole a car to rob a bank? Should a person who broke the speed limit trying to get their pregnant wife to the hospital while she was bleeding out be subject to the same punishment as a person who broke the speed limit joy riding?

Moreover, the spirit of the law is not about what someone feels the law should mean, it’s about what the law is intended mean in the eyes of a reasonable person after consideration of arguments, and a thorough review of the history behind the law. All “letters of the law” are up for interpretation as all language is merely the expression and then interpretation of another’s intent. If this wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be a word for a “miscommunication.”

EDIT: I’d like to add the need to read a law inclusively vs exclusively and how that applies to its interpretation. For example…

A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

A strict letter of the law interpretation read inclusively of the second amendment would imply that everyone has the right to their own private arsenal of nukes. A strict letter of the law interpretation read exclusively of the same text would imply that everyone’s right to bear arms only extends to muskets and other weaponry that existed at the time when it was written. The point being, context matters, a lot.

commandar , (edited )

If the law says you can’t kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?

It depends on how it's defined in the law. States generally don't write laws that define vehicular homicide solely as striking a person specifically with the front of a passenger car for exactly this reason. Further, the need for precision in law is why intentional acts and negligent acts are generally defined separately e.g., murder vs manslaughter.

Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances… in other words shit happens.

Discretion in enforcement/prosecution is not the same thing as enforcing something that isn't defined in law. One is arguably a necessary component of real justice, the other is how authoritarianism functions.

The National Firearms Act has very specific language defining what constitutes a machine gun. It does not include language giving the executive branch power to expand that definition. Either something meets that legal definition and is legally a machine gun or it isn't.

I'm not even saying that it's impossible for an enforcing agency to be given those powers -- the FDA, for example, has been given pretty sweeping authority to classify drugs. In fact, they have the explicit authority to classify analogs of illegal drugs as illegal. That's basically the parallel to what's being discussed here with the NFA and the ATF.

The difference is that Congress hasn't given the ATF the authority to do so. If you want the law to grant the ability to enforce a less specific definition than what exists in the current law then you need to either change the law to carry a more expansive definition and/or give the enforcing agency the power to make that definition outright. Either of those things would allow the sort of enforcement the other commenter was calling for, but it would be within the letter of the law.

The point wasnt that you can't enact a particular law or even that you can't allow for enforcement to be adaptive -- it was that rule of law requires that adaptiveness to be defined within the law itself. It's totally okay if the law says "it depends and here's who decides." It's not okay to decide to enforce the law on the basis of "this is what I feel like the law should do" even if the actual language of the law doesn't support it.

Franzia ,

If there’s a loophole a lawyer will be there.

Astroturfed ,

Ya, it just does functionally the exact same thing. Totally different and logical to allow it.

theyoyomaster OP ,

Any modern gun can functionally do the exact same thing with a beltloop, stick or just your finger. The difference is that a machine gun is actually a specific and different function from this that does it automatically for you.

CmdrShepard ,

So kinda like the same distinction between semi-auto and full-auto? One just does things for you automatically?

theyoyomaster OP ,

Not at all, fully automatic is it will continue to fire so long as the trigger is held down. It has always been that. With both FRTs and bump stocks you still pull the trigger individually for every single round that is fired. You can do the exact same thing without an FRT or a bump stock and even revolvers can be fan fired.

Fondots ,

I think we basically need to take all of our gun laws totally back to the drawing board and start fresh. They’re full of all kinds of goofy definitions and loopholes.

One of my favorites is that, for the most part, muzzleloaders are not considered firearms. Literally the kinds of weapons we had around when the 2nd amendment was penned, and we count them in a different category that the weapons people bend over backwards trying to defend based on their definition of the 2nd amendment.

Don’t anyone get me wrong, I’m overall mostly pro-gun, wouldn’t describe myself as a fundementalist exactly, but while there’s a lot of gun control measures I’d like to see implemented or expanded there’s also plenty of others I’d like to see rolled back to various degrees. Mostly though, what I want is for our laws to make sense, and a lot of them really don’t.

ZombieZookeeper ,

60 people killed by sniper in Vegas.

2A supporters: LOL

Death_Equity ,

He wasn’t a sniper, he was just firing shots indiscriminately.

He used a “bump stock”, not a “forced reset trigger”. You don’t need a bump stock or FRT to fire at a high rate of speed, they just make it easier.

Your valid argument is made weak by your ignorance.

theyoyomaster OP ,

He had bump stocks, the official investigation never determined whether or not he used them or if any of the rifles were illegally modified to be actual machine guns.

Followupquestion ,

The official investigation also never really turned up a motive, and if he was suicidal and wanted to take the maximum number of people with him, he had his own plane, so…

theyoyomaster OP ,

There’s a lot of unanswered questions, even after the investigation was completed. A FOIA request showed that the ATF was prohibited from inspecting any of the guns to check for full auto modifications. It was a deliberate choice by investigators to not determine anything pertaining to the function of any given weapon.

FARTYSHARTBLAST ,
@FARTYSHARTBLAST@kbin.social avatar

That seems really insane, how did they not determine that? What the fuck did they even investigate then?

theyoyomaster OP ,

The simplest and most likely answer is that they didn’t want to know. If they can say “he had bumpstocks” they had reason to ignore the fact that bumpstocks are 100% legal and ban them anyway without legislation. If they had found out that he genuinely modified them to be real machine guns, which are already banned by legislation, then they wouldn’t have their justification for going outside the law. There might be another answer but this is the one that feels the least like a conspiracy theory. It took a FOIA request for them to even admit that they were prohibited from inspecting any of the weapons used.

SeaJ ,

It’s pretty obvious he did but the extremely high rate of fire. You’d have to be nuts to think he brought them but decided his finger had had enough of a work out to be able to for rapidly for an extended period of time. It’s not like he needed precision since he was firing into a giant crowd

napalminjello ,
@napalminjello@kbin.social avatar

If your reply is "well, technically...", "Well, technically", "yeah but, technically..." You may not have as great an argument as you think

Franzia ,

Well technically, I’d rather be informed

Astroturfed ,

He just used a device that achieves the exact same result. Such a solid argument you used to tear him down.

Semi-Hemi-Demigod ,
@Semi-Hemi-Demigod@kbin.social avatar

Those people are still dead no matter what you call the person who pulled a trigger.

This is the most infuriating part about talking to gun nuts.

CmdrShepard ,

Great! If you don’t need either to accomplish that then there’s no reason why a market should exist for them, right?

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