Liberal Justice Elena Kagan said the federal law at the center of the case was written such that “small adjustments of a weapon” would not allow for crafty exceptions to it.
“This statute is loaded with anti-circumvention devices,” Kagan told Jonathan Mitchell, an attorney representing the challenger to the federal bump stock ban.
“The entire way the statute is written suggests that Congress was very aware that there could be small adjustments of a weapon that could get around what Congress meant to prohibit,” Kagan said.
“And in all kinds of ways, you’re accepting of that and saying, ‘yes, you can’t circumvent it by that. You can’t circumvent it by non-conventional triggers,’” Kagan continued. “’But you can circumvent it through this one mechanism.”
Mitchell said he’s not trying to get around the law.
“I’m not conceding that you can circumvent the statute, Justice Kagan, we’re just interpreting the word ‘trigger,’ which is a term that appears in the statutory text and it has to be interpreted,” he said.
