This is why we banned bump stocks: Sixty dead. Four hundred and thirteen injured. One gunman.
Again, that's why bump stocks were banned. A massacre at a country music concert. Bump stocks permit terrorists, both domestic and foreign, to modify any semi-automatic rifle to full-auto. Thus modified, they are crude and easily accessible instruments of mass slaughter.We banned them, and the Supreme Court overturned that ban. The odd arguments offered up by members of the Court about the mechanism involved were obviously, self-evidently immaterial, and the worst form of legalism.
With no training, anyone...I mean anyone...can put an entire magazine downrange in seconds. Reload, then do so again. And then again. Before the Las Vegas massacre, I'd watch gun enthusiast videos about bump stocks, and as they dished about how badass they felt using one, I marveled that they'd not yet been used in a mass shooting. They reduce accuracy, waste ammunition, and are useless for shooting sports. A bump stock would be equally pointless for home defense. But if you're firing into a fleeing crowd, that doesn't matter.
Watching the videos produced by avid gun Youtubers, there was no question about the purpose of a bumpstock. It was a cheap way to circumvent restrictions on full auto machine guns, for funsies. Because what's more fun than blasting away at a target with a couple of hundred rounds? I mean, it would be kind of fun, honestly, in a world where terrorists and psychopaths didn't exist.
But that's not the world we live in. The video above makes that abundantly clear, without commentary or question.
Nor is the world we live in one where making meaningless, obviously specious arguments about trigger mechanisms is anything other than evil. Sure, it's "true," but in the way that willful spin is often "true." We do not limit access to full-auto receivers because we have an issue with receivers. We limit access to full-auto receivers because of what they *do*.
C4 and dynamite aren't the same chemically, but they still blow things up, eh?
A workaround that allows you to do the same thing...to pour hundreds or thousands of rounds into a crowd of warm bodies...violates the obvious intent of restrictions on automatic weapon access.
The sophistry involved in overturning that ban is crude, self-serving, and willfully ignorant. It's argumentation straight out of scholasticism, in which the letter of the law is debated and the intent of the law is ignored. It shows a complete failure to understand the purpose not just of bump stocks, but of the entire system of justice. Overturning that ban poses a threat to law enforcement professionals, to citizens, to all of us.
This is Trump's court, after all, so that should come as no surprise.
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