Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/23pdf/22-976_e29g.pdf
Page Number: 22

18 

GARLAND v. CARGILL 

Opinion of the Court 

against ineffectiveness.  That presumption weighs against 
interpretations of a statute that would “rende[r] the law in 
a great measure nugatory, and enable offenders to elude its 
provisions in the most easy manner.”  The Emily, 9 Wheat. 
381,  389  (1824).    It  is  a  modest  corollary  to  the  com-
monsense proposition “that Congress presumably does not 
enact useless laws.”  United States v. Castleman, 572 U. S. 
157, 178 (2014) (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concur-
ring in judgment). 
  In  ATF’s  view,  Congress  “restricted  machineguns  be-
cause they eliminate the manual movements that a shooter 
would otherwise need to make in order to fire continuously” 
at a high rate of fire, as bump stocks do.  Brief for Petition-
ers 40.  So, ATF reasons, concluding that bump stocks are 
lawful “simply because the [trigger] moves back and forth 
. . . would exalt artifice above reality and enable evasion of 
the federal machinegun ban.”  Id., at 41–42 (internal quo-
tation marks omitted).  The dissent endorses a similar view.  
See post, at 14–17. 
  The  presumption  against  ineffectiveness  cannot  do  the 
work that ATF and the dissent ask of it.  A law is not useless 
merely because it draws a line more narrowly than one of 
its  conceivable  statutory  purposes  might  suggest.    Inter-
preting §5845(b) to exclude semiautomatic rifles equipped 
with bump stocks comes nowhere close to making it useless.  
Under  our  reading,  §5845(b)  still  regulates  all  traditional 
machineguns.  The fact that it does not capture other weap-
ons capable of a high rate of fire plainly does not render the 
law  useless.    Moreover,  it  is  difficult  to  understand  how 
ATF  can  plausibly  argue  otherwise,  given  that  its  con-
sistent position for almost a decade in numerous separate 
decisions was that §5845(b) does not capture semiautomatic 
rifles equipped with bump stocks.  See App. 16–68.  Curi-
ously, the dissent relegates ATF’s about-face to a footnote, 
instead pointing  to  its classification  of  other  devices.   See 
post, at 14–17, and n. 6.