Trump administration bans bump-stock devices on rifles
WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will ban bump-stock devices like the kind used in the 2017 Las Vegas mass shooting, a decision that gun rights groups pledged to fight in court before the ban goes into full effect in about three months.
Justice Department officials said Tuesday that a weapon modified with a bump stock — a type of device that attaches to the butt of a rifle and uses the energy of the gun’s recoil to automatically fire another round — will be classified as a machine gun, meaning that only law enforcement agencies can use them.
As a result, once the new regulations are published by the government Friday, owners of the devices will have 90 days to destroy them or turn them in to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
After the Las Vegas shooting, in which 58 people were killed by a gunman who used rifles with bump stocks to fire down on a crowded outdoor music concert, gun-control advo- cates began pushing for the ATF to re-examine regulations so it could declare bump stocks illegal, because they turn semiautomatic weapons into fully automatic ones.
Justice Department officials said they will publish in the public register in coming days their finding t hat bump- stock- t ype weapons are machine guns, “because such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.”
The move, which had been expected, led three gun-rights groups and a bump stock owner to quickly announce that they were suing the government to stop the new regulation.
Joshua Prince, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs, accused ATF of misleading the public about bump stocks. “They are actively attempting to make felons out of people who relied on their legal opinions to lawfully acquire and possess devices the government unilaterally, unconstitutionally and improperly decided to reclassify as ‘machine guns,’ ” Prince said.