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Notes -
Sotomayor's argument sounds compelling, except that it's not at all how bump stocks, as banned by the rule in question, work. Accelerators with springs (or rubber bands or even shoelaces) were machine guns before the new rule. The bump stocks in question here do not and can not allow continuous fire in a single motion, because they simply have no ability to store energy between cycles of the action.
To operate, the shooter must push the rest of the gun forward from the stock, after each shot, bringing their finger back into contact with the trigger. There is a 'single motion' only in the sense that people can more readily apply forward pressure that can be overwhelmed by recoil than they can make fast squeeze-and-unsqueeze motions.
And that distinction was present even shortly after the NFA's introduction: then as into the 1950s and even now, hand-cranked gatling guns remain legal, while gas- or electric-operated ones were not. They can fire pretty fast, and there are points in their cycle where the shooter is 'just' continuing the spinning motion. But you can't make a heap from grains with the magic of 'action', here: there is a shot, and if the shooter disappeared or petrified by magic at that moment, the gun would stop.
((I'll point to a big frustration I have with the left side of the bench, here. Sotomayor cites and summarizes one case as "United States v. Camp, 343 F. 3d 743, 745 (CA5 2003) (upholding classification of fishing reel attached to a rifle trigger that, upon activation, repeatedly operated the curved lever of the rifle).". Which would be pretty strong evidence in favor of a long history of prosecuting gatling-like devices were that the case! But actually look at it and you get something drastically different [emphasis added]:
Yes, technically a fishing reel was involved. But come on. Camp wouldn't 'activate' the fishing reel; Camp activated a motor attached to the fishing reel. And indeed 'gat crank' devices that are little more than a better-machined fishing reel, without a motor, were still legal under the bump stock rule.))
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