The Trump administration on Tuesday banned the high-power gun
attachments of the type used in last year’s Las Vegas shooting massacre
of 58 people, giving the owners of “bump stocks” 90 days to turn in or
destroy the devices and blocking owners from being able to register
them.
President Donald Trump’s Republican Party typically supports gun
ownership, and its members have fiercely fought off perceived threats to
the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment guaranteeing Americans the
right to bear arms.
His administration, though, is sidestepping any potential debate in
Congress in issuing a final rule on Tuesday that adds bump stocks to a
definition of machine guns written 80 years ago, during the heyday of
gangsters’ use of “tommy guns.”
The attachments use a gun’s
recoil to bump its trigger, enabling a semiautomatic weapon to fire
hundreds of rounds per minute, which can transform the firearm into a
machine gun.
Gun Owners of America said on Tuesday that it was going to court to
fight the new rule and would seek an injunction. The group said the
department was attempting to rewrite laws, the regulation would lead to
bans on other weapons, and bump stocks do not qualify as machine guns.
On
an earlier call with reporters, senior Justice Department officials
said they were ready for any possible lawsuit and confident in the
review of case law they conducted while writing and revising the
regulation. The department received nearly 190,000 comments on its
proposal for the regulation.
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