New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has already been fact-checked and forced to "clarify" her first official statement about the Supreme Court's decision in the bump stock case known as Garland v. Cargill after falsely claiming that the perpetrator of the Tops grocery store shooting in Buffalo used a bump stock-equipped rifle in the 2022 shooting. If Hochul wasn't aware of the facts before she made her falsehood, she's certainly been made aware since her comments came under media scrutiny. Yet on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday, Hochul insinuated that the Buffalo shooting involved a bump stock, while chiding the Supreme Court for ruling that the ATF overstepped its authority in promulgating a ban during the Trump administration. 

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) said the Supreme Court is “living in the 1700s” after it overturned a Trump-era ban on gun bump stocks.

“I mean, they are so out of touch. They’re literally living in the 1700s. They go back to what our Founding Fathers said about guns at a time when we had muskets. We didn’t have bump stocks. We didn’t have machine guns,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. 

"We didn’t have the capacity of a mass shooting that steals the lives of people in my hometown of Buffalo or that kills so many at a gathering of young people out west at a concert,” she added.

Hochul may not have explicitly stated the Buffalo shooter used a bump stock, as she did in her first public comments about the Cargill case, but she definitely left the impression that, like the Las Vegas shootings, the killer in Buffalo used one of the devices when carrying out his attack. Based on her earlier erroneous statement, it's also pretty clear that she wanted CNN's audience to believe bump stocks were used in Buffalo. 

If she's willing to misrepresent the facts about Buffalo, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that she offered such a hot take about the Court living in the 18th century. Did Hochul even bother to read the Supreme Court's decision in Cargill? Based on her comments I'm guessing not. I wonder if CNN's Kaitlan Collins bothered to read it either, since she allowed Hochul's bizarre take to go completely unchallenged. 

Garland v. Cargill wasn't decided on Second Amendment grounds, despite Hochul's allegations. The case did not revolve around what arms were available to Americans in 1791 (though the Court has previously said that the Second Amendment protects modern day arms as well as muskets and the like). The question at the heart of Cargill was whether the ATF overstepped its administrative authority in coming up with the rule banning bump stocks, and the Court concluded that was indeed the case. The majority said nothing about the constitutionality of a bump stock ban, but it certainly hinted that it would be acceptable for Congress to prohibit their sale and possession going forward. 

Hochul's attack on the Court is even more off-kilter thanks to the Court's decision in Rahimi last Friday. Far from "living in the 1700s", eight of the nine justices concluded that the thoroughly modern prohibition on firearm possession for those subject to a domestic violence restraining order is constitutional, pointing to 18th and 19th-century surety laws and statutes punishing "affrays" and declaring them analogous to the modern gun control law.

If anything, Hochul should have offered praise to the Supreme Court for its decision in Rahimi, but that would go against the Democrats' narrative of a Court that's intent on striking down every gun law while establishing a theocratic regime. Democrats like Hochul need the Court as a bogeyman this fall, and if the facts are inconvenient to that narrative, they'll simply be be ignored in favor of a scary story that will go unchecked by anchors like Collins. 

Hochul should have been called out on camera for her fictions. Instead, CNN amplified them. The only good news is that since this was CNN, hardly anyone was watching.