By LINDSAY WHITEHURST (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns and was used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The high court’s conservative majority found that the Trump administration did not follow federal law when it reversed course and banned bump stocks after a gunman in Las Vegas attacked a country music festival with assault rifles in 2017. The gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds in the crowd in 11 minutes, leaving 60 people dead and injuring hundreds more.

The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.

“A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate functions of the trigger,” Thomas wrote in an opinion that contained multiple drawings of guns’ firing mechanisms.

He was joined by fellow conservatives John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Alito wrote a short separate opinion to stress that Congress can change the law to equate bump stocks with machine guns.

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to the Las Vegas gunman. “In murdering so many people so quickly, he did not rely on a quick trigger finger. Instead, he relied on bump stocks,” she said, reading a summary of her dissent aloud in the courtroom.

Sotomayor said that it’s “deeply regrettable” Congress has to act but that she hopes it does.

The ruling came after a Texas gun shop owner challenged the ban, arguing the Justice Department wrongly classified the accessories as illegal machine guns.

The Biden administration said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made the right choice for the gun accessories, which can allow weapons to fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute.

It marked the latest gun case to come before the high court. A conservative supermajority handed down a landmark decision expanding gun rights in 2022 and is weighing another gun case challenging a federal law intended to keep guns away from people under domestic violence restraining orders.

The arguments in the bump stock case, though, were more about whether the ATF had overstepped its authority than the Second Amendment.

Justices from the court’s liberal wing suggested it was “common sense” that anything capable of unleashing a “torrent of bullets” was a machine gun under federal law. Conservative justices, though, raised questions about why Congress had not acted to ban bump stocks, as well as the effects of the ATF changing its mind a decade after declaring the accessories legal.

The high court took up the case after a split among lower courts over bump stocks, which were invented in the early 2000s. Under Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the ATF decided that bump stocks didn’t transform semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. The agency reversed those decisions at Trump’s urging after the shooting in Las Vegas and another mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school that left 17 dead.

Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s stock, the part that rests against the shoulder. They harness the gun’s recoil energy so that the trigger bumps against the shooter’s stationary finger, allowing the gun to fire at a rate comparable to a traditional machine gun. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump stocks.

The plaintiff, Texas gun shop owner and military veteran Michael Cargill, was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group funded by conservative donors like the Koch network. His attorneys acknowledged that bump stocks allow for rapid fire but argued that they are different because the shooter has to put in more effort to keep the gun firing.

Government lawyers countered the effort required from the shooter is small and doesn’t make a legal difference. The Justice Department said the ATF changed its mind on bump stocks after doing a more in-depth examination spurred by the Las Vegas shooting and came to the right conclusion.

There were about 520,000 bump stocks in circulation when the ban went into effect in 2019, requiring people to either surrender or destroy them, at a combined estimated loss of $100 million, the plaintiffs said in court documents.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

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In April, my 92-year-old mother died, nearly 10 years after suffering a stroke that had her come under my full-time care for more than nine years. Some readers may recall some of the columns I’ve done about my caregiver role and the five cross-country moves my mother and I made attempting to find a place that mostly worked for most everybody.

So, when friends received the news of my mother’s death, a fair number of them said “now you can get YOUR life back!”

After being told by some for years that attempting to be the Joan of Arc of Caregiving was not glamorous, and after acknowledging that I had considered more than once just what “my own life” might resemble after so many years, I thought a lot about what people think about providing often indescribably exhausting care for more than a few months. Care that definitely can take a very great something away from one’s “life.” I also thought about what makes some not want to provide care, no matter the circumstances. Which is remarkable given that 70 percent of Americans turning 65 will develop a long-term care need before they die, according to a 2019 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services report.

I guess I was “lucky” when I very unexpectedly became a caregiver, as I was single, childless, and in a better life/work position to do so than my two brothers. And for many others facing similar situations. When my mother had her June 2014 stroke, I sped out of St. Paul to live in her Arizona home and supervise her therapy. I felt it was my duty to do so, but my brothers and I also didn’t want to place her into assisted living just yet. A few months later, I brought her back to Minnesota, where I had spent most of my adult life. Quite a few people said I should have put her in assisted living and that I also should have sheltered her money so that if I ever wised up, Medicaid would pay for the care. As was the case for their parents. OK.

The first three years weren’t too bad, as my mother could still do quite a lot. What was probably too much sacrifice on my part was acceding to her wish to make two moves within those three years — one back to Arizona to be near my brothers and try to reclaim her pre-stroke life, the next to my Milwaukee hometown, which no longer felt much like home after my having been away for decades. As such, I brought both of us back to Arizona from St. Paul in early 2020 following the unexpected death of one of my brothers, the onset of the pandemic of then unknown severity, and the signed promise of help from my remaining brother, who said seasonal service to Minneapolis-St. Paul was available out of Tucson’s easily navigable airport. When I could take a break. A number of friends who said the pope should saint me (which seemed as nuts as being called stupid or nuts) were happy I finally made a decision that, tough as it was, might finally work for everyone.

When my mother deteriorated to the point where long-term-care facility hospice was necessary, there were a few people who thought me negligent and said I should haul out the wallet or take out loans to have round-the-clock home care. Once she was in the first of the two facilities she lived in, I really (really) saw the problems of a rapidly aging population in a country that doesn’t provide reliably quality care on a nationwide basis, at home or in care facilities, without individuals or the government going broke. Or nuts. Along with the spectrum of what people do or do not do as caregivers. This included many adult children who almost never visited, and when they did, screamed indecently about the rotten care provided (including one couple who lived in Maine, visited once a year, and told me I was nuts to be there daily to make sure my mother had a sponge bath or shower while paying $8,000 per month). There were spouses and adult children who mostly moved in and took over, without paying and without nursing staff approval. Then there were the nursing staff who were, for the most part, far too overworked, underpaid and under-appreciated to provide consistently quality care.

Those long-term-care facility horror issue stories you’ve heard? Not all of them are wild exaggerations. I started thinking I wasn’t crazy to keep my mother out of a facility for more than nine years.

Since my mother died, some who called me stupid or a modern-day saint asked if I’d do everything all over again. I would, save those two unsuccessful moves. I hesitate to say this, but I now believe that not putting yourself first doesn’t help you as a caregiver. And I should have taken more than one week of vacation per year. But I’ve asked some of these people what they might do if their parent or spouse needs full-time care from someone. I’ve gotten very curious answers, many of them revolving around caregiving while not “losing” their own lives.

And that’s the matter vexing millions of caregivers, current and future. I only hope that one day, someone, or some group, or some government will do something to not only significantly improve the quality of care in long-term care facilities and make it easier for people who decide to provide care at home, but also foster more nuanced caregiving attitudes. It’s an enormous task. Even a 21st century Joan of Arc probably can’t do it alone.

Until then, I’m going to try to get at least some of my life back (something even my mother endorsed). Once I figure out what that means.

I do hope some of it involves getting back to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport soon enough.

Mary Stanik is a writer and a former St. Paul resident now living in Tucson, Ariz.

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It’s hard to imagine a clearer violation of journalistic ethics than pretending to hold beliefs you don’t, asking Supreme Court justices if they agree, and surreptitiously recording their answers at a no-media dinner. The novelty of the stunt, however, shouldn’t distract us from the real takeaway, which is precisely that the recordings yielded nothing we didn’t already know.

The key conclusions are that Justice Samuel Alito is a religious man; his wife Martha-Ann likes political flags; and Chief Justice John Roberts is genuinely committed to the (somewhat unrealistic) idea that only elected officials — not judges — should make moral decisions.

The recording was obtained by liberal documentarian Lauren Windsor at the annual dinner of the Supreme Court Historical Society, itself a rather misunderstood event. As someone who’s been to the dinner (I was the speaker one year after writing a book on Supreme Court history) let me try to set the scene.

The dinner is a reasonably accessible way for a non-billionaire to hobnob with the justices: Anyone who buys a $500 ticket can attend, which is how Windsor got in. That might sound like a lot of money, but it’s less than many non-rich people pay to go to sporting events or Taylor Swift concerts.

Yet the dinner feels elite. The dress code is black tie. The cause — supporting the society’s work on the history of the court — is worthy, but niche. And the dinner, which is supposed to be off the record, takes place in the great hall of the Supreme Court building, all marble and very grand.

The key point is that, at the dinner, the justices are comfortably at home (it’s their office, after all). They are also, to a degree, the effective hosts of the event. They seem relaxed and friendly, and they get to be real people. Or at least, they used to — now they will have to know they can be recorded by their guests.

Windsor’s recordings show the justices as the familiar figures we know. She got Justice Alito to say that in contemporary America, “there can be … a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult … because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised.” Um, yes? That statement seems incontrovertibly true.

The false-flag journalist then insisted that people who believe in God must “keep fighting … to return our country to a place of godliness.” Alito agreed. Although godliness here is left vague, it’s hard to imagine a genuinely God-fearing person answering otherwise.

As for Mrs. Alito, she of the scores of flags flown at two homes, the most the provocateur could get was that she had been considering flying a Sacred Heart of Jesus flag to respond to a Pride flag in her neighborhood during June — but that her husband had asked her “Oh please, don’t put up a flag.” The exchange appeared to confirm Alito’s letter to two senators in which he essentially said (in the chastened tones of a beleaguered husband) that his wife likes flying flags and all he can do is ask her not to.

As for Roberts, the chief responded to Windsor’s prompts by giving his patented mini-lecture about how justices are just lawyers who shouldn’t take moral right and wrong into account. He also firmly rejected the suggestion that the U.S. is a Christian nation and that the justices should be guided by that idea.

Those were great messages, ones Roberts deeply believes. They certainly echoed his famous comparison of a judge to an umpire whose only job is to call balls and strikes.

But before jumping to the conclusion that Roberts’ answers make Alito’s look bad, notice the limits of the idea that morality has no role in judicial decision-making. It’s hard to see how a court could make decisions about racial equality or abortion rights or gun control without taking some kind of moral stand. Justices Thurgood Marshall and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were great, morally driven advocates for equality who carried their moral values into their Supreme Court service. Even Justice Neil Gorsuch, a non-moral textualist by his own account, is clearly morally motivated in Indian law cases by the profound injustices done to the tribes over centuries. That seems praiseworthy, at least to me.

Justices are human beings, not machines. We should allow them to be humans, even at social events. And we should grow out of the fantasy of justices as perfectly impartial automatons free of human fallibility.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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