Garland v. Cargill: What Is A Machine Gun, Anyway?
July 2024 | Yong Qin Xu (Staff Writer)
When an average person is asked to picture a courtroom, what are they likely to see? Sharp-dressed attorneys and wisened judges revealing shocking twists and turns within an ever-growing labyrinth of evidence while an anxious defendant’s life hangs in the balance? The truth is, courtroom trials in real life are often far different from what’s presented to us through video games or prime-time TV, and a lot of these life-changing cases more often than not boil down to arguments over the definitions of certain terms and phrases rather than the constant revelations of mind-blowing plot twists. For example, what is the definition of a weapon? Can someone’s fists or a piece of rope be considered a weapon if they’re used to harm another? Questions like these may seem ridiculous and their answers obvious, but in cases involving aggravated assault, whether or not the suspect used a weapon can significantly alter what sorts of punishment they’re eligible to receive. In such cases, defining what “a weapon” actually means cannot be more important. Therefore, any court decision in which the definition of a term is legally changed via precedence can have potentially earthshaking implications. Garland v. Cargill is one of such cases, and its final decision changed the world of American firearms regulation forever.
In 1934, Congress passed the National Firearms Act, aimed at restricting civilian access to “gangster-type” weapons such as machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. [1] Within this law, a machine gun was specifically defined as “any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” [2] In other words, if a gun fires more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger by any means or mechanism, then it’s to be considered a machine gun. The law explains that “the term shall also include the frame or receiver of any such weapon, any part designed and intended solely and exclusively, or combination of parts designed and intended, for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun” [3] is legally a machine gun. This definition essentially specified that any extra parts or modifications which can turn a non-machine gun into a machine gun would also be legally qualified as machine guns.
As years turned to decades, the definition of a machine gun remained relatively well-understood and unaltered, but all of that changed in 2017. Shortly after the mass shooting incident at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, the definition of what a machine gun is suddenly became a hot subject of contention. Based on the ATF’s investigations, the Mandalay Bay shooter killed 58 people using a vast arsenal consisting of 24 weapons, 12 of which were outfitted with bump-stocks. [4] A bump-stock is a piece of recoil-compensating accessory capable of “bouncing” a gun forwards off of user’s shoulder after a shot is fired, thus pushing the gun’s trigger into its user’s finger and allowing them to continuously fire more shots without any further movements beyond the initial trigger-pull. [5] Under the original National Firearms Act, bump stocks were not considered as machine guns or as components capable of creating machine guns. However, this ruling came into question following the Mandalay Bay shooting because several eye-witnesses of the event described the gunshots as “gradually getting faster” and “sounding like they came from an automatic weapon.” [6] Given the massive casualties caused by this shooting and its perpetrator’s possession of several bump-stocks, then-president Donald Trump formally requested his Attorney General to dedicate all available resources towards banning devices with the capability to modify legal firearms in such a way that they resemble banned machine guns. [7] Following the rulemaking procedures allotted in section 553 of the Administrative Procedure Act, the Department of Justice was able to include bump-stock devices into the definition of machine guns as specified in the original National Firearms Act, thus effectively banning their transfer and manufacturing for civilian use. [8] It’s worth noting that Congress was not directly involved in this rule change.
The Garland v. Cargill case that overturned this rule change began in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals after a man named Micheal Cargill was made to surrender the bump-stocks under his ownership. When the rule first changed, Cargill surrendered the bump-stocks in his possession without much incident. However, in January of 2023, he filed an appeal against the ATF’s demands for him to do so. The appeal primarily argued that bump-stocks are not in fact machine guns by the definition of the National Firearms Act, but also that even if they were, the Department of Justice and the ATF should not have the right to change the scope of a law without Congress. [9] The appeal acknowledged that the main reason the ATF changed its ruling on bump-stocks was because of the Las Vegas shooting, but stressed the fact that bump-stocks were not the only firearm-enhancing accessories the shooter possessed. Additionally, the appeal used the National Firearms Act’s own definitions of a machine gun against itself to argue that bump-stocks cannot be machine guns because they do not affect how many bullets are fired with a single mechanical function of the trigger. [10] The shooter can still technically only fire one bullet with one trigger-pull, he would simply be doing so a lot faster than he would be able to unassisted, seeing as he would not need to move his finger but instead only has to maintain forward pressure on his weapon. In other words, Cargill’s appeal argued that bump-stocks are not machine guns according to the National Firearms Act because bump-stock enabled guns still only fire one bullet per “single function of the trigger,” which means they do not match the first definition of a machine gun given by the law.
Cargill’s appeal reached the Supreme Court of the United States in November of 2023, was argued in February of 2024, and finally decided upon in June of the same year. [11] The final decision reached for the case, as authored by Justice Clarence Thomas, generally agreed with the arguments presented in Cargill’s initial appeal. Essentially, because a bump-stock does not alter the fundamental trigger mechanism of any gun it’s attached to, it cannot allow a gun to fire more than one shot per trigger-pull if it’s already a law-complying non-automatic weapon prior to the modification. Every shot fired by the gun still requires an ongoing manual input from the shooter, even if it’s simply the act of maintaining forward pressure on the gun to take advantage of recoil, so a bump-stock enabled gun would not qualify as a machine gun under the National Firearms Act’s definitions. [12] Justice Samuel Alito concurred with Justice Thomas’ decision, claiming that the National Firearms Act does not have the ability to ban bump-stocks in its current state because bump-stocks cannot be included in its definitions of a machine gun, and it can only be amended by Congress to allow for such definitions. [13] In other words, Justice Thomas agreed with the first argument of Cargill’s appeal and Justice Alito agreed to the second one.
The dissenting opinion against Cargill was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who argued that “maintaining forward pressure to take advantage of recoil” does not actually count as conscious manual input from the user of a given firearm to pull the trigger. Since guns generally cannot fire themselves without human action, a “single function of the trigger” should measure the amount of human movements made to pull the trigger instead of simply how many times the trigger was mechanically pulled. [14] Justice Sotomayor essentially argued that as far as the average person’s understanding of the act of pulling a trigger goes, bump-stocks still allowed multiple shots from one pull of the trigger, but in the end, Justice Thomas’ opinion won out and Cargill’s appeal was ruled in his favor.
The Garland v. Cargill case may seem like an almost meaningless argument over a technicality at first. After all, Cargill already surrendered his bump-stocks, and whether or not this one specific gun accessory was taken away from people should not in any way stop them from ending lives with firearms. Yet, this case serves as a perfect demonstration of just how important specific language can be to the field of law. The entire disagreement in the Garland v. Cargill case basically boiled down to what a “single function of the trigger” meant and whether it measured a human movement or a mechanical one. This one seemingly minute detail alone could decide the validity of an entire legal ruling, and all it took was one man to notice this fact. In the end, it would seem that the act of pulling a trigger was ruled as a mechanical movement, which may have a negative impact on future gun control related ruling as the law’s definitions sway away from human agency. Ironically, the idea that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” was used as part of the dissenting argument in favor of gun control in this case, the political implications of which remain to be seen.
Sources
Greg S. Weaver, “Firearm Deaths, Gun Availability, and Legal Regulatory Changes: Suggestions from the Data,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 92, no. 3 (2002)
National Firearms Act, 26 U.S.C. ch. 53 § 5845 (1934).
Ibid.
Stefan Becket, “More details revealed about Las Vegas shooter's arsenal of weapons.” CBS News, October 4, 2017.
Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. __ (2024)
Mia Romano & Dru Stevenson, “Litigating the Bump-Stock Ban.” Kansas Law Review 70, no. 243 (2021)
Ibid.
Mia Romano & Dru Stevenson, “Litigating the Bump-Stock Ban.” Kansas Law Review 70, no. 243 (2021)
Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. __ (2024)
Ibid.
"Garland v. Cargill." Oyez. Accessed July 21, 2024.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.