I think musk made a flamethrower as a joke at one point. Not sure if he sold them or just joked that he would because they were legal.
Lol fair enough. And by "every," I mean like 3 or 4 in the past few years. I just recently started going. If you need a golf ball launcher for whatever reason, I know a place..
Eleventh Circuit: "The plain language of the statute defines a machine gun as any part or device that allows a gunman to pull the trigger once and thereby discharge the firearm repeatedly." Your argument is "Well, yes, it does that, but only if you use it as its designed to be used! If you don't, it only fires one bullet at a time." As I said, trivial technicalities.
My brother has an attachment that shoots golf balls. Another (or maybe the same one) shoots soda/beer cans. That was fun.
No, my argument is that it’s a device that allows a gunman to pull the trigger a bunch of times really fast and doesn’t automatically do literally anything.
The gunman depresses his finger once, leaves it in place, and the gun continuously fires. The bump stock makes that possible if you use it as it was designed. Like I said, you're arguing trivial technicalities, like Mr. Akins was.
If you can pull that off and fire the gun accurately, more power to you. You're not adding a part to the gun for it do that.
But once you admit that bump-firing isn’t automatic fire (which you essentially have to, because it clearly isn’t), there’s no particularly principled basis to conclude that some things that make bump-firing easier are machineguns (notwithstanding the statutory definition) and some aren’t. The solicitor general agreed during oral argument that belt loops and rubber bands are not machineguns, even if used to bump-fire. How about just holding a pencil through the trigger guard instead of putting your finger through it? What about guns that are very easy to bumpfire on their own (generally light, short guns where your natural instinct is to push the gun forward with your support hand rather than pulling it back into your shoulder)? How about a bumpstock that you never actually attach to the gun (keep your AR in a buffer tube only configuration and just sit in the piece of plastic when you want to shoot)? There’s no principled basis to draw a distinction between any of them, because they’re all doing the same thing, they’re all making the gun bump-fire in the same way, and none of them are causing more than one shot per cycle of the trigger. Stated differently, there are slight differences in how each of these hypotheticals are configured, but none of those differences have anything to do with any aspect of the statutory definition of a machinegun. The only reason for the differing treatment is that the government wants shooting really fast to be illegal, but realizes no one would take seriously the suggestion that my hand, or my pants, or a pencil, is a machinegun.
It's not a trivial technicality because that isn't what actually happens. Absent other continued and regulated input from the shooter, doing exactly what you describe results in exactly one shot, not continuous fire.
Conveniently ignoring this part: "The gunman depresses his finger once, leaves it in place, and the gun continuously fires. The bump stock makes that possible if you use it as it was designed."
Then why isn’t every gun capable of being bump-fired (which would be every semi-automatic gun in existence that has a traditional trigger) a machinegun instead of only ones with a bump stock? I understand the practical reason DOJ can’t take that position (because no one will take them seriously if they assert that there is no distinction between a semiautomatic and an automatic weapon since every semi-auto is secretly actually also a machinegun), but there isn’t really any easily articulated and principled basis to distinguish one method of bumpfiring from any of the others.
No, I am not ignoring it. It is impossible to use a bump stock as designed to produce multiple shots doing only what you described. That would imply a bump stock is self regulating. It is not. Using a bump stock as designed requires the use of the support side hand to regulate the bumping of the index finger against the trigger through continuously modulated pressure based upon the firing cycle of the rifle. It is not as simple as “push it forward and it goes ratatatatata”.
That is indeed my point. When you are using it as designed, you need not pull the trigger more than once. You depress the trigger, leave your finger there, and it continuously fires. The principled basis is that this adds a part to the gun to modify it for that purpose.
