Donald Trump's Bump Stock Ban Turns Peaceful Gun Owners Into Felons by Fiat

The ban, which took effect this week, usurps congressional authority by rewriting an inconvenient law.
Jacob Sullum
Reason
Mar. 29, 2019

As of midnight on Tuesday, owners of "bump-stock-type devices" became felons, subject to a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison and a $250,000 fine. That's a pretty nasty surprise for anyone who bought these products, which were repeatedly declared legal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) during the Bush and Obama administrations. It is especially unsettling because the law has not changed since the agency made that determination.

What happened instead is that the ATF, under orders from Donald Trump, reinterpreted the law to reach a diametrically opposed conclusion that is contrary to the plain meaning of the relevant statutes. [...]

Bump stocks are accessories that facilitate a rifle shooting technique in which recoil energy causes the gun to slide backward after a round is fired, resetting the trigger. By maintaining forward pressure on the rifle, the shooter bumps the trigger against his stationary finger, which fires another round, causing the rifle to slide backward again, and so on. Until October 1, 2017, the technique, which increases the rate of fire but reduces accuracy, was of interest mainly to gun enthusiasts, the companies that sold bump stocks, and the ATF officials who approved their sale. But after a gunman equipped with multiple rifles and bump stocks murdered 58 people in Las Vegas, Trump promised to ban the devices by administrative fiat.

The ATF rule that took effect this week accomplishes that trick by reclassifying bump stocks as illegal machine guns. The problem is that federal law defines a machine gun as "any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger." A rifle with a bump stock does not fire automatically, since the shooter has to push the rifle forward while keeping his finger in position, and it does not fire more than one round by a single function of the trigger, since the trigger has to be reset before another round can be fired. That is why the ATF concluded, over and over again, that bump stocks are not machine guns. That is why, even after the Las Vegas massacre, both supporters and opponents of a bump stock ban agreed that it could be accomplished only by a new act of Congress.

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