With deadly mass shootings as horribly commonplace as unhinged Trump tweets, and 2017’s gun death toll reaching an all-time high of nearly 40,000, it’s easy to feel like the US is totally incapable of having a real conversation about its gun violence problem – let alone ever passing laws to try and reduce the number of lives needlessly lost.
But an actual win in that fight happened today, with the US government following through on its promise to ban bump stocks.
Bump stocks are an attachment that allow rifles to fire like machine guns, bringing their fire rate up to anywhere between 400 and 800 rounds per minute.
The shooter who killed 58 people and shot more than 400 overall in Las Vegas in October 2017 used AR-15 rifles fitted with bump stocks to fire over 1000 rounds into a festival crowd in a ten-minute period, making it the deadliest mass shooting committed by a single person in modern American history.
It’s about time. It’s been 443 days since a shooter in Las Vegas used a bump stock to murder 58 people in just 11 minutes. Very relieved that the Admin is finally listening to what the vast, vast majority of Americans have been demanding here.https://t.co/AvRARokrA2
— Tammy Duckworth (@SenDuckworth) December 18, 2018
The ban, which has bipartisan support, was announced in March this year, when President Trump instructed the Bureau Of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives to regulate bump stocks as machine guns. (Machine gun and assault rifle ownership by civilians is subject to relatively tight regulation by the ATF.)
It was just a few weeks after the Parkland, Florida high school shooting, where bump stocks weren’t involved but the murder of 17 people seemed to galvanise the gun-control argument more than the countless other, similar incidents.
MARJORY STONEMAN DOUGLAS HIGH SCHOOL, PARKLAND, FLORIDA. 02/25/2018
Photo by Giles Clarke/Getty Images
Civilians who own one or more bump stocks have until March 2019 – or 90 days from this Friday – to surrender their devices, or to destroy them beyond repair. After that point, possession will be illegal.
The National Rifle Association, perhaps surprisingly, has not opposed the ban, endorsing the idea last year that bump stocks should be subject to more regulation – potentially as a small, weaksauce win to gun control activists.
@NRA statement. I'll be on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss. pic.twitter.com/hP6wuccSNr
— Chris Cox (@ChrisCoxNRA) October 5, 2017
An NRA spokesperson expressed disappointment today that there wouldn’t be an amnesty on devices already in circulation, acquired when they were legal.
There’s no justification for bump stocks that transform semi-automatic weapons into machine guns. That’s why I cosponsored a bill to ban them. I’m pleased the Justice Dept. has announced they will ban these dangerous devices. https://t.co/cKJ0jR0mtN
— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) December 18, 2018
It’s a direct ban on one specific kind of device that makes big guns fire more bullets faster – there are still other kinds, like trigger cranks, that aren’t affected by this.
And it does absolutely zilch about any of the actual firearms in legal and illegal circulation in the US, of which there are estimated to be nearly 400 million.
But it’s a tiny little win.