There’s the letter of the law and then there’s the spirit of the law. What was the law made for?
I think the idea of banning fully automatic weapons was to make it more difficult to have a high rate of firing. All of these automatic adjacent fixes are skirting the letter of the law, in spite of the spirit of the law.
There’s the letter of the law and then there’s the spirit of the law.
Only the former should be legally enforceable. If you start enforcing the latter regardless of the former, the legal system stops being about rule of law and more about the subjective whims of those enforcing it.
If the letter of the law doesn’t capture the intent, then the law needs to change, but laws shouldn’t be subjectively enforced on the basis of what someone feels like they should mean rather than what they actually say.
If the law says you can’t kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?
Humans are a (I’ll give you flawed) part of the system for good reason, and it isn’t so the exact letter of the law can be enforced. The point should always be to understand what the law is trying to accomplish, and enforce that in the most consistent and unsurprising way possible.
This is necessary even when the exact letter of the law is spelled out because times change, and it’s unreasonable to expect every law to be updated for every edge case. Airplanes aren’t driven into anybody, but they’re piloted. “Your honor, I did not drive into my ex-wife, I flew into my ex-wife, which the law says nothing about!”
Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances… in other words shit happens. Should a person who stole a car to chase after a burglar be punished the same as someone who stole a car to rob a bank? Should a person who broke the speed limit trying to get their pregnant wife to the hospital while she was bleeding out be subject to the same punishment as a person who broke the speed limit joy riding?
Moreover, the spirit of the law is not about what someone feels the law should mean, it’s about what the law is intended mean in the eyes of a reasonable person after consideration of arguments, and a thorough review of the history behind the law. All “letters of the law” are up for interpretation as all language is merely the expression and then interpretation of another’s intent. If this wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be a word for a “miscommunication.”
EDIT: I’d like to add the need to read a law inclusively vs exclusively and how that applies to its interpretation. For example…
A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
A strict letter of the law interpretation read inclusively of the second amendment would imply that everyone has the right to their own private arsenal of nukes. A strict letter of the law interpretation read exclusively of the same text would imply that everyone’s right to bear arms only extends to muskets and other weaponry that existed at the time when it was written. The point being, context matters, a lot.
If the law says you can’t kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?
It depends on how it’s defined in the law. States generally don’t write laws that define vehicular homicide solely as striking a person specifically with the front of a passenger car for exactly this reason. Further, the need for precision in law is why intentional acts and negligent acts are generally defined separately e.g., murder vs manslaughter.
Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances… in other words shit happens.
Discretion in enforcement/prosecution is not the same thing as enforcing something that isn’t defined in law. One is arguably a necessary component of real justice, the other is how authoritarianism functions.
The National Firearms Act has very specific language defining what constitutes a machine gun. It does not include language giving the executive branch power to expand that definition. Either something meets that legal definition and is legally a machine gun or it isn’t.
I’m not even saying that it’s impossible for an enforcing agency to be given those powers – the FDA, for example, has been given pretty sweeping authority to classify drugs. In fact, they have the explicit authority to classify analogs of illegal drugs as illegal. That’s basically the parallel to what’s being discussed here with the NFA and the ATF.
The difference is that Congress hasn’t given the ATF the authority to do so. If you want the law to grant the ability to enforce a less specific definition than what exists in the current law then you need to either change the law to carry a more expansive definition and/or give the enforcing agency the power to make that definition outright. Either of those things would allow the sort of enforcement the other commenter was calling for, but it would be within the letter of the law.
The point wasnt that you can’t enact a particular law or even that you can’t allow for enforcement to be adaptive – it was that rule of law requires that adaptiveness to be defined within the law itself. It’s totally okay if the law says “it depends and here’s who decides.” It’s not okay to decide to enforce the law on the basis of “this is what I feel like the law should do” even if the actual language of the law doesn’t support it.
The spirit of the law is to ban machine guns, not set a subjective and arbitrary “firing rate” for semi automatics. You can achieve the same effect with any semi auto by just holding your beltloop. The only argument for it meeting the “spirit” of the law was that the NFA was a brazen attempt to skirt the 2nd Amendment and the goal was to ban as much as they could without it being thrown out, so this does sorta fit in with that, but not really.
I mean, they really aren’t used in crime in any appreciable way. Criminals just modify/use real machine guns. The law in question doesn’t even apply to felons, only legal gun owners can be charged with it.
That’s not exactly true. There are quite a few Glocks with illegally-installed full-auto switches, making them illegal machine guns. Those are definitely used in crime, mostly gang violence I think, at least based on the news reports of seizures I’ve seen.
That is exaxtly what I was referring to. FRTs aren’t what are turning up at crime scenes. When you’re committing murder, the majority of which is gang related, you don’t bother with expensive work around; you just put a switch in your Glock and call it a day. It also helps that felons and minors can’t be charged with a crime under the NFA for possession of a machine gun like a switched Glock.
I’m not going to say that they have never been used in a crime because nothing is absolute, but they are definitely a niche and rare even outside the context of crimes. I would be very surprised if there has actually been a case of “a 5 year old” getting murdered with one like the other guy suggested. I feel like it’s both extremely unlikely statistically and something that would have generated massive media coverage.
Any modern gun can functionally do the exact same thing with a beltloop, stick or just your finger. The difference is that a machine gun is actually a specific and different function from this that does it automatically for you.
Not at all, fully automatic is it will continue to fire so long as the trigger is held down. It has always been that. With both FRTs and bump stocks you still pull the trigger individually for every single round that is fired. You can do the exact same thing without an FRT or a bump stock and even revolvers can be fan fired.
I mean, a machine gun is a legal term that they do not meet the definition of, so there’s that.
There’s the letter of the law and then there’s the spirit of the law. What was the law made for?
I think the idea of banning fully automatic weapons was to make it more difficult to have a high rate of firing. All of these automatic adjacent fixes are skirting the letter of the law, in spite of the spirit of the law.
Only the former should be legally enforceable. If you start enforcing the latter regardless of the former, the legal system stops being about rule of law and more about the subjective whims of those enforcing it.
If the letter of the law doesn’t capture the intent, then the law needs to change, but laws shouldn’t be subjectively enforced on the basis of what someone feels like they should mean rather than what they actually say.
If the law says you can’t kill people by driving into them, and then someone slides into them (intentionally), is that illegal?
Humans are a (I’ll give you flawed) part of the system for good reason, and it isn’t so the exact letter of the law can be enforced. The point should always be to understand what the law is trying to accomplish, and enforce that in the most consistent and unsurprising way possible.
This is necessary even when the exact letter of the law is spelled out because times change, and it’s unreasonable to expect every law to be updated for every edge case. Airplanes aren’t driven into anybody, but they’re piloted. “Your honor, I did not drive into my ex-wife, I flew into my ex-wife, which the law says nothing about!”
Beyond that, judges exist and are given sentencing discretion (or at least should be) because there are mitigating circumstances… in other words shit happens. Should a person who stole a car to chase after a burglar be punished the same as someone who stole a car to rob a bank? Should a person who broke the speed limit trying to get their pregnant wife to the hospital while she was bleeding out be subject to the same punishment as a person who broke the speed limit joy riding?
Moreover, the spirit of the law is not about what someone feels the law should mean, it’s about what the law is intended mean in the eyes of a reasonable person after consideration of arguments, and a thorough review of the history behind the law. All “letters of the law” are up for interpretation as all language is merely the expression and then interpretation of another’s intent. If this wasn’t the case, there wouldn’t be a word for a “miscommunication.”
EDIT: I’d like to add the need to read a law inclusively vs exclusively and how that applies to its interpretation. For example…
A strict letter of the law interpretation read inclusively of the second amendment would imply that everyone has the right to their own private arsenal of nukes. A strict letter of the law interpretation read exclusively of the same text would imply that everyone’s right to bear arms only extends to muskets and other weaponry that existed at the time when it was written. The point being, context matters, a lot.
It depends on how it’s defined in the law. States generally don’t write laws that define vehicular homicide solely as striking a person specifically with the front of a passenger car for exactly this reason. Further, the need for precision in law is why intentional acts and negligent acts are generally defined separately e.g., murder vs manslaughter.
Discretion in enforcement/prosecution is not the same thing as enforcing something that isn’t defined in law. One is arguably a necessary component of real justice, the other is how authoritarianism functions.
The National Firearms Act has very specific language defining what constitutes a machine gun. It does not include language giving the executive branch power to expand that definition. Either something meets that legal definition and is legally a machine gun or it isn’t.
I’m not even saying that it’s impossible for an enforcing agency to be given those powers – the FDA, for example, has been given pretty sweeping authority to classify drugs. In fact, they have the explicit authority to classify analogs of illegal drugs as illegal. That’s basically the parallel to what’s being discussed here with the NFA and the ATF.
The difference is that Congress hasn’t given the ATF the authority to do so. If you want the law to grant the ability to enforce a less specific definition than what exists in the current law then you need to either change the law to carry a more expansive definition and/or give the enforcing agency the power to make that definition outright. Either of those things would allow the sort of enforcement the other commenter was calling for, but it would be within the letter of the law.
The point wasnt that you can’t enact a particular law or even that you can’t allow for enforcement to be adaptive – it was that rule of law requires that adaptiveness to be defined within the law itself. It’s totally okay if the law says “it depends and here’s who decides.” It’s not okay to decide to enforce the law on the basis of “this is what I feel like the law should do” even if the actual language of the law doesn’t support it.
If there’s a loophole a lawyer will be there.
You sound like someone who would date a child, but it’s fine because you didn’t do anything sexual until it was legal.
Weird example…
But it’s totally legal by the letter of the law! See, it’s a really stupid fucking argument now isn’t it?
If they wanted to ban any device that enabled firing more than N rounds per minute, they could have.
The spirit of the law is to ban machine guns, not set a subjective and arbitrary “firing rate” for semi automatics. You can achieve the same effect with any semi auto by just holding your beltloop. The only argument for it meeting the “spirit” of the law was that the NFA was a brazen attempt to skirt the 2nd Amendment and the goal was to ban as much as they could without it being thrown out, so this does sorta fit in with that, but not really.
“At least… it wasn’t… a machine gun” - last words of a five year old killed by one of these.
God bless America.
I mean, they really aren’t used in crime in any appreciable way. Criminals just modify/use real machine guns. The law in question doesn’t even apply to felons, only legal gun owners can be charged with it.
That’s not exactly true. There are quite a few Glocks with illegally-installed full-auto switches, making them illegal machine guns. Those are definitely used in crime, mostly gang violence I think, at least based on the news reports of seizures I’ve seen.
That is exaxtly what I was referring to. FRTs aren’t what are turning up at crime scenes. When you’re committing murder, the majority of which is gang related, you don’t bother with expensive work around; you just put a switch in your Glock and call it a day. It also helps that felons and minors can’t be charged with a crime under the NFA for possession of a machine gun like a switched Glock.
I’m not going to say that they have never been used in a crime because nothing is absolute, but they are definitely a niche and rare even outside the context of crimes. I would be very surprised if there has actually been a case of “a 5 year old” getting murdered with one like the other guy suggested. I feel like it’s both extremely unlikely statistically and something that would have generated massive media coverage.
Ya, it just does functionally the exact same thing. Totally different and logical to allow it.
Any modern gun can functionally do the exact same thing with a beltloop, stick or just your finger. The difference is that a machine gun is actually a specific and different function from this that does it automatically for you.
So kinda like the same distinction between semi-auto and full-auto? One just does things for you automatically?
Not at all, fully automatic is it will continue to fire so long as the trigger is held down. It has always been that. With both FRTs and bump stocks you still pull the trigger individually for every single round that is fired. You can do the exact same thing without an FRT or a bump stock and even revolvers can be fan fired.