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Page Number: 30.0

6 

GARLAND v. CARGILL 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

forward in the bump stock, which presses the trigger into 
his  trigger  finger,  Cargill  v.  Barr,  502  F. Supp.  3d  1163, 
1175 (WD Tex. 2020).  As long as the shooter keeps his trig-
ger  finger  on  the  finger  rest  and  maintains  constant  for-
ward pressure on the rifle’s barrel or front grip, the weapon 
will  fire  continuously.    See  83  Fed.  Reg.  66516.    A  rifle 
equipped with a bump stock can fire at a rate between 400 
and 800 rounds per minute.  Tr. of Oral Arg. 40. 

II 
  A machinegun does not fire itself.  The important ques-
tion under the statute is how a person can fire it.  A weapon 
is a “machinegun” when a shooter can (1) “by a single func-
tion of the trigger,” (2) shoot “automatically more than one 
shot,  without  manually  reloading.”    26  U. S. C.  §5845(b).  
The plain language of that definition refers most obviously 
to a rifle like an M16, where a single pull of the trigger pro-
vides continuous fire as long as the shooter maintains back-
ward  pressure  on  the  trigger.    The  definition  of  “ma-
chinegun”  also  includes  “any  part  designed  and  intended 
. . .  for  use  in  converting  a  weapon  into  a  machinegun.”  
Ibid.    That  language  naturally  covers  devices  like  bump 
stocks, which “conver[t]” semiautomatic rifles so that a sin-
gle pull of the trigger provides continuous fire as long as the 
shooter maintains forward pressure on the gun. 
  This is not a hard case.  All of the textual evidence points 
to the same interpretation.  A bump-stock-equipped semi-
automatic  rifle is  a  machinegun  because (1) with  a single 
pull  of  the  trigger,  a shooter  can (2)  fire continuous shots 
without  any  human  input  beyond  maintaining  forward 
pressure.    The  majority  looks  to  the  internal  mechanism 
that  initiates  fire,  rather  than  the  human  act  of  the 
shooter’s initial pull, to hold that a “single function of the 
trigger” means a reset of the trigger mechanism.  Its inter-
pretation requires six diagrams and an animation to deci-
pher the meaning of the statutory text.  See ante, at 8–11,