Gun Rights Supporters Outraged over Donald Trump’s Bump Stock Ban

Newspapers and news outlets around the country report that gun rights supporters are outraged about President Trump’s bump stock ban.

For example, Fox News ran the headline “Bump stock ban has gun rights advocates up in arms.”

The Salt Lake Tribune’s headline read, “‘Really a dangerous precedent’: Utah gun advocates are angry about the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks.”

The Tribune reports that gun rights advocates see the ban as a civil rights infringement that will not prevent mass shootings.

Utah Shooting Sports Council’s Clark Aposhian said of the Trump administration, “They were just looking for a scapegoat and they found one.”

Women Against Gun Control founder Janalee Tobias observed, “It’s really a dangerous precedent.” She suggested the ban is indicative of blaming a device rather than the person who misuses the device and thereby sets the stage for more bans down the road.

The Washington Examiner reports that gun rights advocates feel the ban is a “betrayal” and a “stab in the back.”

The Examiner pointed to Gun Owners of America and Firearms Policy Coalition (FPC) as two gun rights groups filing suit against the ban. FPC has already filed its suit.

FPC’s Brandon Combs said:

The bottom line is President Trump has been more anti-gun in his tenure, in terms of legislation and regulations, than the Obama administration. I think his base is probably going to see in the next election cycle the choice between someone who has not been great for us and someone who would probably be worse. Then the question is, what would that mean for turnout?

Reason suggested the ban represents an entirely new law, written by the DOJ/ATF rather than Congress. It warned of the precedent set by such an approach to lawmaking.

On December 18, 2018, Breitbart News reported that the DOJ released the final language of the impending ban. Its summary of the ban said:

The Department of Justice is amending the regulations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) to clarify that bump-stock-type devices-meaning “bump fire” stocks, slide-fire devices, and devices with certain similar characteristics-are “machineguns” as defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 because such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.

Bump stock owners have 90 days to destroy their devices or hand them over to law enforcement.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, 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.