134
Opinion of the Court
would not have permitted enhanced sentencing, if the same charges had been divided into six separate prosecutions for the six separate bank robberies, enhanced sentencing would clearly have been required. We are not disposed to give the statute a meaning that produces such strange consequences.2
The dissent contends that § 924(c)(1) must be read to impose the enhanced sentence only for an offense committed after a previous sentence has become final. Though this interpretation was not mentioned in petitioner's briefs, and was put forward only as a fallback position in petitioner's oral argument, see Tr. of Oral Arg. 4, the dissent thinks it so "obvious," post, at 142, that our rejection of it constitutes a triumph of "textualism" over "common sense," post, at 146, and the result of "an elaborate exercise in sentence parsing," ibid. We note, to begin with, that most of the textual distinctions made in this opinion—all of them up to this point— respond to the elaborate principal argument of petitioner that "conviction" means "entry of judgment." It takes not much "sentence parsing" to reject the quite different argument of the dissent that the terms "subsequent offense" and "second or subsequent conviction" mean exactly the same thing, so that "second conviction" means "first offense after an earlier conviction."
No one can disagree with the dissent's assertion that "Congress sometimes uses slightly different language to convey the same message," post, at 137—but when it does so it uses "slightly different language" that means the same thing. "Member of the House" instead of "Representative," for
2 The dissent contends that even under our reading of the statute, "prosecutors will continue to enjoy considerable discretion in deciding how many § 924(c) offenses to charge in relation to a criminal transaction or series of transactions." Post, at 145. That discretion, however, pertains to the prosecutor's universally available and unvoidable power to charge or not to charge an offense. Petitioner's reading would confer the extraordinary new power to determine the punishment for a charged offense by simply modifying the manner of charging.
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