Remember when the nutjob shot up a music crowd in Las Vegas while using a bump stock, and ever gun grabber out there immediately called for their abolition? Well, here’s this
Trump to Announce Bump Stock Ban, A Largely Meaningless Gesture
The Trump administration will soon ban bump stocks, the aftermarket devices allowing semi-automatic weapons to fire multiple shots in rapid succession, CNN reported Wednesday.
The move will come nearly 14 months after Stephen Paddock used bump stocks to help him kill 58 people at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas. Days after the shooting, President Trump said he would look into banning bump stocks. And for a moment, it looked as if he might have had the National Rifle Association on his side. The group said at the time that “devices designed to allow semi-automatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.†(snip)
Trump, however, forged ahead. On March 23, weeks after the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, and one day before the March for Our Lives, he announced a new regulation to ban bump stocks. At the time, then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions called the move a “critical step in our effort to reduce the threat of gun violence.â€
That’s nonsense. The bump stock ban is, and has always been a smokescreen. Making these devices illegal will do nothing to reduce gun violence in the U.S. That’s why they’ve become an easy target for the Trump administration. Banning bump stocks won’t make people safer, but it’s a simple way to pretend to.
Bump stocks are a novelty. Few people knew what they were before the Las Vegas shooting, and those who did largely considered them unreliable and impractical. There are also other devices that have the same effect on semi-automatic weapons. Making bump stocks the boogeyman made perfect sense for gun rights advocates. Focusing on them takes attention off of the weapons themselves, and banning them would take away only one method of bump firing a semi-automatic rifle.
Now, just imagine that it was Barack Obama who was banning bump stocks: do you think this article would be dismissive of banning them, or would Obama be lauded? Trump is implementing a regulation on bump stocks exactly as the gun grabbers asked for, but, now, it’s not enough. Had it been Obama this would have been seen as an small, but important, step forward.
