Welcome to Gunlandia. You Live Here Now.

To the Supreme Court and the GOP, the answer to any gun question is MORE.

Last week the Supreme Court issued another decision on guns, the latest in a line whose animating principle can be summed up in one word: MORE. More guns, in more places, in more people’s hands. While the details of this case are worth examining (which I’ll do briefly), it’s important to step back from the legal minutiae to remind ourselves that as the courts and lawmakers change our laws about guns, they’re creating a particular kind of world we’ll all have to live in. And even though Democrats in blue states have passed many laws attempting to limit the proliferation of guns, there’s no question that the right is winning this contest. They’re trying to build Gunlandia, and they want us all to live there. 

This is particularly important to keep in mind when we’re dealing with the Supreme Court because the justices in the conservative majority — the ones actually deciding what Gunlandia will look like — refuse to admit that they’re the designers of this nation of fear and bloodshed. They’re just reading the Constitution, they say, checking the history, examining the plain words of statutes. What kind of world that creates isn’t up to them. 

It’s a lie, and like all lies it must be called out. 

Bump up the jam, bump it up 

This latest case, Garland v. Cargill, concerned bump stocks, devices that allow you to transform a semi-automatic rifle into the equivalent of a machine gun, firing as many as 800 rounds per minute. In 2017, a man used rifles equipped with bump stocks to fire over 1,000 rounds into a crowd attending a music festival in Las Vegas; he killed 58 people and injured hundreds more, making it the worst mass shooting in American history. 

It was the first time most people had heard of bump stocks, and amid a wave of public pressure, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) ruled that bump stocks qualified as machine guns under the National Firearms Act of 1934, which had been amended to include in the definition of machine guns not just the guns themselves but devices that enabled semi-automatic guns to be converted to fire fully automatically. As a result, bump stocks have been mostly illegal to possess or sell, just as machine guns are.

The decision, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, struck down the ATF rule with a detailed analysis of the phrase “single function of the trigger” in the statute, and whether “function” refers to what is occurring mechanically inside the gun (his position) or whether it refers to what the person firing it is doing, i.e. how many times they’re pulling with their finger. Because a bump stock essentially bounces the bulk of the gun rapidly back and forth against the shooter’s stationary finger, Thomas decided, it doesn’t qualify and is therefore legal. He was so enthused about diving into this analytical thicket that he even included six illustrations of gun mechanisms to make his case, helpfully provided by a gun rights group.

Bump stocks have only two uses, neither of which involves self-defense, for which they are of little use because they make firing highly inaccurate. The first use is for recreation: Some people just find it fun to empty a 30-round magazine into the side of a hill in two or three seconds. The second use is to kill as many people as possible in a crowded space where accuracy isn’t a concern. Like a concert, or a classroom. 

Given that neither of these two uses is of vital importance to either individual liberty or the creation of a good society, bump stocks shouldn’t be something any of us, including judges, would feel compelled to work all that hard to protect. Presented with two competing readings of a statute, both of which are plausible, a judge might lean in favor of the regulating agency’s reading. Unless there’s something egregiously wrong in the ATF’s judgment — which there clearly isn’t — one might think they’d prevail. What would we lose if they did? Some folks would have to do their target shooting without a bump stock, and some future mass murderers might have a lower body count. That’s it.

But if your bottom line on guns is always MORE, your calculation is different. 

On our way to Gunlandia

Gun advocates always say that the answer to gun violence is more guns, and they’ve gotten what they wanted. Gun sales are now double what they were 15 years ago, as measured by the FBI background check system, which captures only sales made at licensed dealers. 

Sales for the first five months of 2024 are running at 86% of the 2023 figures, which would bring us back to the pre-pandemic level. But when millions of guns are being sold every month, the number in circulation keeps going up, since many fewer are destroyed. While it’s hard to know exactly how many guns are in circulation, The Trace estimates that the number is around 378 million, more than one gun for every man, woman, and child in America:

There are still wide variations from state to state: According to the latest data available (which was gathered before the pandemic sales explosion) people in Montana or Wyoming were six times as likely to own guns as people in Hawaii or Massachusetts. Firearm mortality also varies widely by state: in 2022, there were 29.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents (including both homicides and suicides) in Mississippi, but only 3.1 per 100,000 in Rhode Island, almost a 10-1 difference. 

Maximal gun proliferation wasn’t always central to conservative identity, but it is today: There are no elected Republicans who will assent to any but the most minimal regulation of gun ownership, and they are all committed to making it easy to manufacture, sell, and own as many guns as possible. One of the key steps in working toward the creation of Gunlandia is to systematically undermine liberals’ attempt to create any non-Gunlandia oases, by having the Supreme Court strike down blue-state laws regulating guns and pushing for the enactment of policies like “concealed carry reciprocity,” which allow people to essentially carry their home state’s permissive gun laws with them when they go to other states.

That’s a key feature of Gunlandia, that even if you live in a place where most people find gun proliferation abhorrent, you’re just going to have to suck it up and tolerate the constant fear that comes with knowing that people around you are armed. And fear is at the center of Gunlandia’s ideology: Because people have guns and that’s scary, we all have to have guns so we won’t be scared. Of course, the more people have guns the scarier it is, so we need yet more guns. 

Implicit in their factually false and logically insane “more guns, less crime” argument is that at some point, there will be so many guns that we finally achieve safety. So if we’re approaching 400 million guns today, when will we finally feel safe? Will that blessed day arrive when we reach 500 million guns? A billion guns?  

The Supreme Court, the Republican Party, and all those carrying us to Gunlandia aren’t quite sure. But they know where they want us to go, and to every question of law or policy, they have the same answer: MORE.