Justice Department begins process to ban bump stocks

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department announced Friday that it has started the process to amend federal firearms regulations to clarify that federal law defines bump stocks as machine guns.

President Donald Trump ordered the department to work toward a ban after the Florida high school shooting. Bump stocks, which enable guns to fire like automatic weapons, were used in the Oct. 1 massacre on the Strip.

Trump tweeted Friday: “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.”

Meanwhile, a poll conducted by The Associated PRESS-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 69 percent of Americans think gun laws in the United States should be made stricter. Overall, 90 percent of Democrats, 54 percent of gun owners and 50 percent of Republicans now favor stricter gun control laws.

Sixty percent believe making it harder to legally obtain a gun would result in fewer mass shootings.

The AP-NORC poll of 1,122 adults was conducted March 14-19 using a sample drawn from NORC’S probabilitybased Amerispeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the

U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.