“Lumpy” Thomas comes through for gun lovers by voting to legalize bump stocks.
In a departure for the Supreme Court, justices met with members of the press at a D.C. IHOP following the announcement of the recent 6-3 ruling which legalized bump stocks. The meeting, said Chief Justice John Roberts, digging into a short stack, was part of “the new transparency” being effected by the high court. Justices Sotomayor, Kagen and Brown did not attend. According to Justice Clarence Thomas, “It’s their time of the month,” and he chuckled softly.
A bump stock, a device whereby a semi-automatic weapon functions as a machinegun, was ruled illegal in 2017 in a surprising Trump-era regulation. The law came about as a result of a mass shooting in Las Vegas, Nevada earlier that year, in which dozens of persons were slain. Alt-right media figure Alex Jones has speculated that the 58 badly mutilated corpses “were only acting.”
In his majority opinion, Thomas wrote that a semi-automatic weapon fitted with a bump stock does not meet the technical definition of a “machinegun.”
Wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent: “When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” At the press conference, Thomas remarked that “Sotomayor can duck off!”
When contacted at home about Thomas’s remarks, Justice Sotomayor said simply that “I disagree strongly with Lumpy!” (Thomas is known familiarly amongst his SCOTUS colleagues as “Lumpy” after the late Frank Bank character Clarence Lumpy Rutherford, who appeared in the vintage “Leave it to Beaver” sitcom in the 1960s. According to Thomas’s wife Ginni, the appellation is one of affection.
The lawsuit was brought by Texas-based gun owner Michael Cargill, a licensed firearms dealer. Bump stocks use the recoil energy of a trigger pull to enable the user to fire up to hundreds of rounds with what the federal government calls “a single motion.” Cargill’s lawyers say it is a difficult skill to master. But, says Cargill, he’s “willing to put in the effort.”
Justice Thomas exited the lunch/press conference early, citing a previous appointment with billionaire sugar daddy Harlan Crow. The long-time friends had a date to tour Walmart parking lots in the Georgetown area.
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