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Page Number: 32.0

8 

GARLAND v. CARGILL 

SOTOMAYOR, J., dissenting 

Ibid. 
  Nothing  about  those  definitions  suggests  that  “function 
of the trigger” means the mechanism by which the trigger 
resets mechanically to fire a second shot.  See ante, at 8–11 
(explaining  the  interior  mechanics  of  an  AR–15  trigger 
mechanism),  as  opposed  to  the  process  that  a  pull  of  the 
trigger on a bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle sets 
in motion.  The most important “function” of a “trigger” is 
what it enables a shooter to do; what “force or mechanism” 
it sets “in action.”  11 Oxford English Dictionary, at 357.  A 
“single function of the trigger” more naturally means a sin-
gle initiation of the firing sequence.  Regardless of what is 
happening  in  the  internal  mechanics  of  a  firearm,  if  a 
shooter must activate the trigger only a single time to initi-
ate  a  firing  sequence  that  will  shoot  “automatically  more 
than one shot,” that firearm is a “machinegun.”  §5845(b). 
  Evidence of contemporaneous usage overwhelmingly sup-
ports that interpretation.  The term “ ‘function of the trig-
ger’ ”  was  proposed  by  the  president  of  the  National  Rifle 
Association (NRA) during a hearing on the National Fire-
arms  Act  before  the  House.    See  National  Firearms  Act: 
Hearings  on  H. R.  9066  before  the  House  Committee  on 
Ways  and  Means,  73d  Cong.,  2d  Sess.,  38–40  (1934).    He 
understood the “distinguishing feature of a machine gun [to 
be] that by a single pull of the trigger the gun continues to 
fire.”  Id., at 40.  He emphasized that a firearm “which is 
capable of firing more than one shot by a single pull of the 
trigger, a single function of the trigger, is properly regarded 
. . . as a machine gun.”  Ibid.  Distinguishing a machinegun 
from a pistol, the NRA president emphasized that for a pis-
tol “[y]ou must release the trigger and pull it again for the 
second  shot  to  be  fired.”    Id.,  at  41.    He  did  not  say  “the 
hammer slips off the disconnector just as the square point 
of  the  trigger  rises  into  the  notch  on  the  hammer  . . . 
thereby  reset[ting  the  trigger  mechanism]  to  the  original 
position.”  Ante, at 11.  He instead emphasized the action of