President Trump on Friday said that the Justice Department was poised to take steps to ban bump stocks — and slammed his predecessor for making them legal.
“Obama Administration legalized bump stocks. BAD IDEA. As I promised, today the Department of Justice will issue the rule banning BUMP STOCKS with a mandated comment period. We will BAN all devices that turn legal weapons into illegal machine guns,” Trump tweeted shortly before 5 p.m. as he was aboard Marine One on the first leg of his trip to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Bump stocks are devices that make semi-automatic rifles fire more rapidly, almost like a fully automatic machine gun.
They became a major issue after 64-year-old Stephen Paddock shot 58 people dead in Las Vegas last October using rifles equipped with the devices.
Another 851 were wounded or injured in a panicked stampede in Las Vegas when the shooting broke out at an outdoor country music concert.
Trump vowed to take executive action to ban the devices after the massacre.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Justice would ask the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to clarifying that bump stocks fall within the definition of “machine gun” under federal law.
“After the senseless attack in Las Vegas, this proposed rule is a critical step in our effort to reduce the threat of gun violence that is in keeping with the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress,” Sessions said.
The NRA — which supports the ban — has also accused the Obama administration of legalizing bump stocks, an assertion that the website PolitiFact rates as “mostly true” because the ATF approved applications from a pair of manufacturers to make them.
But Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA who specializes in guns, said the ATF didn’t have much of a choice because the devices were not against any existing laws.
The ATF approved it “not because they liked it, but because the law did not permit them to prohibit it,” Winkler told the website.