WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump didn’t actually want to ban bump stocks. When he did so, he knew the Supreme Court would likely overturn his action.
In a 6-3 decision on Friday, that’s exactly what the judges did.
The decision revealed Trump’s true feelings on the issue after a seven-year political drama when he accepted a court that reversed it with his spokesman saying Americans should respect the decision.
It is possible that the Supreme Court – at a lower level, but in a similar way to its decision to overturn the right to abortion – triggers a reaction that helps President Joe Biden and hurts Trump in his November rematch.
But for now, Trump’s strategy to avoid a lasting response to the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting appears to have worked as planned.
Immediately after this massacre, which claimed 58 lives and resulted in hundreds of injuries, Trump found himself faced with a thorny political dilemma.
Shocked and outraged by the murders, approximately 4 out of 5 Americans said the government should cut off access to bump stocks, the type of shoulder protection device that allowed the killer, Stephen Paddock, to fire a semi-automatic rifle at the speed of a fully automatic weapon. Democrats, then in the minority in both chambers, demanded congressional action, and some Republican lawmakers agreed with them.
Trump was faced with an unpleasant choice: do nothing and alienate traditional voters or pressure Congress to legislate a ban, which would anger some gun-rights voters in the Republican Party base and highlight divisions within his own party.
Republican lawmakers said he would be able to pass a bill through Congress if he chose that path. “No one has my back in my district more than Donald Trump,” then-Representative Tom Rooney, Republican of Florida, said at the time. “They believe in Donald Trump and they believe that if he thinks [bump stocks] should be illegal, should be illegal.”
Trump found a third option that lowered the temperature in the gun control debate in the short term — stealing momentum from congressional efforts to ban bump stocks — and took the issue to a conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
Taking a cue from the National Rifle Association, Trump used his executive authority to draft a Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives regulation banning bump stocks.
“I went with them,” Trump said of the NRA in a 2023 interview with CNN.
Like him, the gun lobby’s biggest player wanted to avoid both a new firearms control law and the perception of inaction in the face of the Las Vegas massacre. It would be more difficult to repeal a law than to reverse a regulation, and the legislative process is confusing enough that a new law could end up including other restrictions on firearms.
Top NRA executives said the ATF should verify that bump stocks complied with federal law.
“The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function as fully automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulation,” Wayne LaPierre and Chris Cox, then of the NRA, said in a statement at the time, stopping short of explicitly concluding that the bump stocks in fact do just that.
It was precisely this language that Justice Clarence Thomas focused on when writing Friday’s majority opinion.
“This case questions whether a bump stock – an accessory for a semiautomatic rifle that allows the shooter to quickly reactivate the trigger (and therefore achieve a high rate of fire) – converts the rifle into a ‘machine gun,’” Thomas wrote. “We maintain that this does not happen.”
Trump has shown no qualms about attacking the courts and their officials when he believes he hasn’t gotten what he wants. He did none of that on Friday. Instead of commenting directly when the opinion became public, Trump let his campaign do the talking. A statement released by campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt preached deference to judges.
“The court has spoken and its decision must be respected,” she said, “calling Trump a “fierce defender” of gun rights. And, she noted, he has the support of the NRA.
Trump has followed the gun lobby’s lead in trusting the court to ensure shooters have access to stocks. It took seven years for this plan to come to fruition. But happened.
This story originally appeared on NBCNews.com read the full story
