The terrorist SCOTUS
Back on October 1, 2017, when 64-year-old Stephen Paddock opened fire on a Las Vegas crowd, he used a total of a thousand rounds of ammunition before they found his body. With all those bullets, Paddock managed to murder 59 people and wound 413 more in less than ten minutes. Fourteen of the twenty-four firearms he brought with him to the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Hotel were .223-calibre AR-15-type semi-automatic rifles. It was a case of, if you’ll pardon the word, overkill. With all that firepower, Paddock clearly intended to kill a lot more human beings that night. Mr Paddock might therefore ironically be termed an underachiever.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. To achieve the destruction of a maximum number of innocent human lives, Paddock employed a surprisingly simple technology called a “bump stock.” A bump stock is a replacement for the wooden stock of the rifle. It takes advantage of the rifle’s recoil.
Every time the rifle recoiled, the bump stock caused the entire weapon to lurch forward and reload, employing simple inertia to do so. Without it, the AR-15 fires only one bullet at a time for each squeeze of the trigger. With the bump stock, the AR-15 spews out a continuous stream of deadly bullets at the rate of about 90 bullets in ten seconds with a single trigger squeeze. Each clip carried 30 rounds, so Mr Paddock was able to empty those clips in 3 seconds. He had lots and lots of clips, and several AR-15 rifles already equipped with bump stocks and ready to go.
No one is confused about the purpose of the bump stock. It owes its existence to one purpose: so that the shooter can destroy a maximum number of human lives in the shortest possible time. It is a miracle of simple technology. It converts the civilian semi-automatic AR-15 into a fully automatic machine gun.
As with many technologies, there is a trade off with the bump stock. The bump stock sacrifices accuracy for the speed with which it helps the shooter murder so many human beings in such a short amount of time. Luckily for Mr Paddock, accuracy was not the order of the day. The crowd was dense, and his goal was to send a lethal spray of bullets down on them quickly, before they had a chance to run away and hide. He didn’t even need to aim.
Everywhere Paddock pointed his gun there was a father, a mother, a son, a daughter, an innocent human being enjoying their lives, a person who never harmed Mr Paddock, or was ever even rude to him. They probably would have helped him if they saw he was in trouble, had a flat, had tripped and fallen down, and so on. He murdered them or fucked up their lives for absolutely no reason, no reason at all. He did it because he could, because he had a weapon intended to do just that, modified and assisted with a bump stock. A murder weapon.
On Friday the Supreme Court of the United States decided that the regulation banning bump stocks is unconstitutional. With logic more appropriate to a lunatic asylum, the court decided that banning bump stocks meant that psychopaths were unfairly limited in their God-given right to murder as many people in as short a space of time as possible. That’s just not fair, SCOTUS decided, so the regulation had to go. Bump stocks can once again be sold to ammosexuals and gun-fetishists in “sporting” goods stores and trade shows across the nation.
The justice they chose to write the majority opinion was Samuel Alito, the man who favours unconstitutional activities, like attacking the Capitol when an election doesn’t go his way. With the logic of a man who decided his LSD wasn’t working fast enough and decided to shoot some heroin, Alito wrote, “That event [the Las Vegas shooting] demonstrated that a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock can have the same lethal effect as a machine gun, and it thus strengthened the case for amending [the law on machine guns]. But an event that highlights the need to amend a law does not itself change the law’s meaning.” In other words, they can get their bump stock ban just as soon as Congress fixes the law. The same Congress headed up by MAGA Mike Johnson. Right.
By the way, I forgot to mention, the number of people that Stephen Paddock injured that horrible night wound up being 867, not 413. The ensuing panic caused by Mr Paddock and his bump stock-augmented AR-15s more than doubled the number of people injured directly by his bullets. Terror was an important feature of the evening, and the terrorist majority of the SCOTUS just made America a little safer for fellow terrorists. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.