On Friday, the Supreme Court agreed to hear another gun case. That alone should make people hide under their desks at school, because at this point in our bloody republic, every time the Supreme Court decides to entertain the gun lobby, more children are likely to die.

The case involves a challenge to the federal ban on “bump stocks.” Bump stocks are a modification that can be attached to semiautomatic rifles to make them perform as fully automatic weapons. A shooter pulls the trigger to fire the weapon, and the bump stock uses the recoil from that action to pull the trigger again and again, resulting in a near continuous rate of fire, just like a machine gun.

I have never heard a reasonable argument for why a sportsman or a hunter needs to turn their rifle into a machine gun with the use of a bump stock to kill Bambi’s mom. The only purpose of a bump stock is to kill as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. That is, in fact, how a bump stock was used in the 2017 Las Vegas music festival mass shooting. Aided by bump stocks, shooter Stephen Paddock, 64, was able to fire 1,058 bullets from 15 of the 24 different weapons he brought with him to Vegas, killing 60 people and wounding hundreds more. He did this in around 10 minutes.

In response to this mass shooting, the Trump administration (yes, that Trump administration) banned bump stocks in 2018. Trump’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms determined that bump stocks turned guns into machine guns, and machine guns have been banned in the US since 1986. Don’t worry, marksmen, you can still buy 24 guns and bring thousands and thousands of rounds of ammunition with you to “hunt,” as Paddock did… you just have to unload all of that lead semiautomatically instead of fully automatically. I’m sure that the National Rifle Association markets some kind of muscle-relaxing cream for shooters who get cramps in their trigger finger.

Still, ammosexuals and the gun lobby were not happy; apparently, the level of death shooters are able to unleash without bump stocks is not enough for them. So a collection of groups and individuals sued the government in multiple jurisdictions to keep their bump stocks.

The lower federal circuits disagreed with each other on whether the bump stock ban is constitutional; the reason was the wording of the 1986 ban on machine guns. The 1986 law defines machine guns as weapons that automatically fire more than one shot “by a single function of the trigger.” Bump stocks are designed to try to circumvent this precise formulation. The gun’s recoil “bumps” up against the shooter’s shoulder, causing additional pulls of the trigger without the shooter having to think about it, thus, ammosexuals argue, achieving multiple “functions of the trigger” instead of just one.

The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected this obvious sophistry and upheld the bump stock ban. That court ruled that, from the shooter’s perspective, there is only one pull of the trigger, and that one pull results in continuous fire. The ultraconservative and functionally deranged Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, of course, saw things differently, and ruled that bump stocks are not machine guns because they still require one pull per bullet. Meanwhile, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which sprawls from Michigan to Tennessee, said that the 1986 law is itself ambiguous, and struck down the bump stock ban based on something called “the rule of lenity,” which is a legal term for the idea that when a criminal law is ambiguous, the benefit of the doubt should go to the criminal defendant.

These disparate court opinions highlight a consistent problem with federal weapons bans, even when Congress gets its hands out of the NRA’s pockets long enough to pass one: If you ban a gun, gun manufacturers will just make a different one that does the same thing but call it something else. That’s why I’ve never been in favor of an “assault weapons ban”: No matter how the government defines assault weapons, engineers will just view it as a challenge to make a slightly different, but still deadly, weapon of mass destruction that avoids the technical definition of what was banned. If you ban AR-15s today, they’ll start producing AR-1500s tomorrow, and Republicans in Congress and on the courts will argue that the new gun is totally different from the one that was prohibited. The way forward is to ban guns except as needed by a well-regulated militia. Everything else is just changing the retail name of the thing that will be purchased to murder children and ex-girlfriends.