Bump-stock ‘Bam blame’

President Trump on Friday said 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 semiautomatic ri- fles fire more rapidly, almost like a fully automatic machine gun.

They became a major issue after 64-year-old Stephen Paddock shot 58 innocent people dead in Las Vegas in October using rifles equipped with the devices.

Trump vowed to take executive action to ban the devices after the massacre.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said he would ask the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to clarify the 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,” Sessions said.

The NRA — which supports the ban — has also accused the Obama administration of legalizing bump stocks, an assertion that the Web site Politi Fact 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, said the ATF didn’t have much of a choice because the devices were not against any existing laws. They approved it “not because they liked it, but because the law did not permit them to prohibit it,” Winkler told the Web site.