Going back more than five years, to the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, I’ve made two points about “bump stocks.”
One is that, since these devices make semiautomatic guns fire about as rapidly as fully automatic weapons — which are heavily regulated and spray bullets when their triggers are held down — they should be treated like fully automatic weapons under the law.
But the other is that Congress, not the executive branch, must act to make this a reality. The statute governing “machine guns” defines the term in a way that simply doesn’t describe how a bump stock functions. As I put it in 2017, “bump stocks do not allow the user to fire multiple times ‘by a single function of the trigger’ — they just make the trigger function a whole lot faster.” The executive branch has some leeway to interpret laws, but it has no authority to rewrite them.
The Trump administration banned bump stocks by executive fiat anyway. For a while it looked like the courts might let it go. But late last week the Fifth Circuit found the ban illegal, creating a “circuit split” that the Supreme Court may have to address.
Or, Congress could do its job and legislate on the matter directly.