Gun bills inspired by Oct. 1 stalled

Inaction frustrates shooting survivor

reviewjournal.com/lvshooting

WASHINGTON — Bartender Heather Gooze was terrified in July when fireworks exploded over Las Vegas, with its crowds and brilliantly lit casinos.

The sharp crack of the colorful blasts brought back darker memories for Gooze, a survivor of the Oct. 1 shooting.

“The fireworks sounded exactly like the gunshots,” she recalled. “The 4th of July was horrific.”

Gooze continues to grapple with the emotional baggage from the Las Vegas shooting, and she is disillusioned that a year later nothing has been done on the federal level, despite all the good intentions and promises from the White House and Congress.

Last year she testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her “night of terror” at the Route 91 Harvest festival. In her testimony, Gooze urged lawmakers to ban “bump stocks,” the devices used by the Las Vegas

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gunman to accelerate the rate of fire of semi-automatic rifles to nearly that of automatic weapons.

In the wake of the shooting, Congress filed a flurry of bills, including those that would ban or restrict bump stocks. But lawmakers failed to pass any of the gun bills.

President Donald Trump also called for tighter regulations on bump stocks by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That remains under review.

Since the Las Vegas tragedy, another mass shooting occurred at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. That shooting led to legislation adopted to strengthen the national database used in background checks for firearm purchases.

A few months later, the Parkland, Florida, high school shooting captured the nation’s attention and spurred a grassroots movement for gun safety legislation headed by students who survived the harrowing experience.

Gooze returned to Washington this spring for the March for Our Lives, where hundreds of thousands gathered to advocate for gun safety legislation following the Florida high school shooting. Although she’s not a gun owner, she’s been around them, and she believes in the Second Amendment.

After a year of reflection, she does not understand why lawful gun owners don’t support background checks for purchases and a ban on bump stocks.

Gooze also has become wise to the sharp division of public opinion on the issue and the zero-sum politics played by advocates and special interests. She is leery of the public exposure her volunteer efforts have brought.

“I don’t like to take sides politically. I don’t like that this has become a political debate,” she said. “It’s become so ugly.”

Since the Oct. 1 shooting, Gooze understands the gun debate on a more personal level.

“You don’t think it’s a big deal until it happens to you,” she said.

Bump stock BAN

In the Las Vegas shooting, Stephen Paddock, 64, attached bump stocks to 13 semi-automatic rifles that he used to shoot from his hotel suite into a crowd of 22,000 concertgoers. The shooting claimed the lives of 58 people and wounded hundreds more, making it the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

Immediately following the shooting, lawmakers drafted legislation to restrict gun purchases or ban devices like bump stocks and trigger mechanisms in an attempt to prevent another such attack. Those measures remain bottled up in House and Senate committees.

The Trump administration called on the ATF, an agency under the Justice Department, to review its 2010 ruling that bump stocks were not machine guns and were legal under current law.

Sen. Dean Heller and Rep. Mark Amodei, both Nevada Republicans, joined in the call for administrative action on bump stock devices, a measure endorsed by the National Rifle Association.

ATF review

At the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, ATF officials said the agency would likely need legislation to overturn the 2010 ruling, which found that bump stocks still required a finger pull to fire a round from a semi-automatic weapon.

“What the ATF said initially was that they didn’t have the jurisdiction,