The Trump Administration Just Moved to Ban Bump Stocks in 90 Days. It Deserves Credit.
The Trump administration deserves credit. It has responded to something happening in reality with a course of action that will address the problem.
Granted, it took over a year for the federal government to finalize a response after a man camped in a hotel room above the Las Vegas Strip used semiautomatic rifles outfitted with a "bump stock"-a device that allows them to essentially operate as fully automatic weapons-to kill 58 people and leave 527 wounded in the worst mass shooting in modern American history. And granted, it is the lowest possible bar to expect the government of an industrialized nation to ban citizens from obtaining de facto machine guns, sometimes without so much as a background check.
But it is action, via the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
The devices, which accelerate the rate of fire of semi-automatic weapons and enabled a lone shooter in a hotel room to kill 58 and wound hundreds more, will be defined as “machine guns.” Possession of the devices will become a felony offense.
Owners will have 90 days to destroy their bump stocks or turn them into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Owners also can contact local law enforcement offices to see if they would be willing to accept the devices.
The politics of the move were intricate. Trump, to his credit, came out for the ban in February at a meeting with lawmakers after yet another incident of American mass murder-the shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. He suggested it wouldn't require an act of Congress, and could be done through executive action. The NRA initially supported reining in bump stocks in October 2017, shortly after the shooting, on the basis that it didn't truly qualify as gun control.
But by February 2018, spokesperson Dana Loesch was on This Week declaring the NRA's opposition to a legislative ban through Congress. That meant the NRA supported Trump's executive route, which he directed then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to pursue on February 20. Congress seems happy with all this, as they're always happy to do nothing about gun violence. After all, a vote for banning bump stocks could, in the current environment, lead to a primary challenge for a Republican congressman.
After rounds of rule-making and public comment, the rule is now being finalized. Because it is an executive action, it may be more susceptible to a court challenge-something gun-control activists warned the president about, and which his predecessor, President Obama, knows all too well. Republicans railed against Obama's executive policymaking, and not without reason, but now even the NRA seems to support an executive restriction on gun rights. The most cynical view of this would be that the organization thinks the rule could be overturned in court anyway.
Still, though, the government of the United States has moved to control a small slice of gun ownership, and made it effective within 90 days. It matters, if only to show that gun rights-like any right-have limits, and that enforcing those limits does not render those rights non-existent. That is the essential operating principle of the NRA, which opposes all gun control, ever, on the basis of not one step backwards. This is a step forward, but only one in a very slow, and consequently bloody, process. We will sacrifice many more lives, young and old, at the altar of violent American freedom before it's over.
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