A handful of cities and states have adopted bump stock gun control in the months after the criminal use of the devices in the October 1, 2017, Las Vegas attack.
The Associated Press reports that two states, Massachusetts and New Jersey, have banned the devices completely. Denver, Colorado, and Columbia, South Carolina, have banned them as well.
Bump stocks use the inertia of a firearm’s recoil to help fire the gun quickly, allowing gun owners to mimic full auto fire in short bursts. They were approved for sale by Barack Obama’s ATF 2010.
Crucial to the ATF’s approval of bump stocks was the fact that they do not convert a semiautomatic firearm into an automatic one. Even with a bump stock attached, a semiautomatic rifle only fires one round with each trigger pull. Gun control proponents have muddied the water here by often presenting bump stocks as a conversion device. However, in reality, bump stocks were made legal for sale because they do not convert the firearm’s action.
Nevertheless, Massachusetts banned the devices, ordering residents to surrender them or face “criminal prosecution.” And former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) signed a ban on bump stock possession as one of his last acts in office, giving law-abiding residents 90 days to surrender their bump stocks or be criminalized. No example of the criminal use of bump stocks in Massachusetts or New Jersey was cited during legislative debate on the bump stock bans.
Massachusetts, New Jersey, Denver, and Columbia, moved to ban bump stocks after the public refused to support Democrat efforts against the devices in the U.S. Congress.
The ATF is currently weighing whether to redefine the term “machinegun” in the National Firearms Act (1934), so as to cover a “machinegun” and a non-machinegun at the same time. If they succeed in doing this, they will be able to use backdoor gun control to ban bump stock possession via regulatory action.
Gun Owners of America is leading the fight against the ATF’s backdoor attack on Second Amendment, warning that a ban on bump stocks is easily broadened to include whatever fits the whims of the ruling class.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange
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