Longacre: Clarence Thomas is a ‘MAGA’ flunky

Donald Trump has once again brought ignominy upon the Supreme Court. Let’s forget about Clarence Thomas’ lack of ethics, since that seems to be a basic Trump follower requirement, and concentrate on his recent legal sleight of hand and how this makes his ethical lapses pale in comparison.

On the surface, the case at hand, Garland v. Cargill, is about bump stocks and whether the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives was correct in adding them to the 1934 antimachine gun law after the horrendous mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival on Oct. 1, 2017. In this event, the shooter, using bump stocks, enabled semiautomatic rifles to fire some 540 rounds per minute. In the space of several minutes, the shooter killed 60 and wounded at least 413. ATF experts decided that 540 rounds/minute was close enough to machine gun speed (no human can accomplish that with individual trigger pulls) and outlawed bump stocks under the 1934 law.

But Clarence and his buddies were more interested in calling out the experts at the bureau — part of what “Make America Great Again” followers call the “administrative state” — than they were about the safety of the American public. Using precise diagrams and pretending to engineer expertise, Thomas concentrates on “the mode of action by which the trigger activates the firing mechanism.” The trigger finger is “involved” with each shot in a different way than it is involved in the firing of a “machine gun” in the 1934 definition. Therefore, regardless of the firing speed bump stocks provide, they should be legal.

Perhaps even more troubling than his upstaging the experts in government is his injection of a huge dose of what all wannabe dictators, including Trump, crave in their potential subjects: fear.

Frederick Longacre

Hockessin

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