In October 2017, a shooter brought multiple weapons, thousands of rounds of ammunition, and 100 round extended magazines into the Las Vegas Mandalay Bay hotel. He chose that hotel for the vantage point it afforded over a country music concert below.
60 people were killed and 413 people were wounded by gunfire in TEN minutes.
The deadliest mass shooting by a lone shooter in modern U.S. history involved weapons equipped bump stocks. It opened a lot of eyes to the destructive power of available weaponry in the United States. It didn’t, however, trigger any reaction to reduce gun violence.
Watch this disturbing video of that event.
Hear the sound of war on the Las Vegas Strip.
Listen to the rapidity of rounds being fired by LEGAL machine guns.
Parkland High School Shooting
Another mass shooting was in the news on February 14, 2018, just months after the Las Vegas bloodbath.
On that day, a student armed with an AR-15 style weapon walked the halls of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida spraying bullets. He managed to kill 17 people and wound 17 others before being arrested.
Unlike Nevada, Florida responded nearly immediately. Governor Rick Scott signed gun control legislation three weeks after the murders. The law raised the age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21, provided for arming some teachers, added mental health assistance in schools, and banned bump stocks.
The NRA immediately filed a federal lawsuit against Florida arguing the age limit increase violated the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.
March For Our Lives
On March 24, 2018, student activists organized the largest single day rally ever, March For Our Lives with hundreds of thousands participating all over the country. They demanded gun control changes commensurate with rampant gun violence in the United States.
State legislators — inspired by a movement led by the student survivors of that mass shooting in Parkland, Florida — started passing legislation to restrict gun access.
This was a year of unparalleled success for the gun-control movement in the United States. States across the country, including 14 with Republican governors, enacted 50 new laws restricting access to guns, ranging from banning bump stocks to allowing authorities to temporarily disarm potentially violent people.
After Parkland, States Pass 50 New Gun-Control Laws – Stateline
Since then, the March For Our Lives group continued to mobilize in their quest to be free of gun violence. While they’ve had success participating in the winning of over 300 new gun laws, there’s unrelenting pressure to eliminate gun laws altogether.
In contrast to Rick Scott signing 2018 gun legislation to reduce and control access to firearms, Governor Ron DeSantis signed permitless carry legislation in September, 2023 that allows legal owners of handguns to carry their weapons nearly everywhere in Florida.
Bump Stock Machine Guns
Please watch at least a few seconds of one more video that demonstrates the subject of this post. It’s instructive but not disturbing unless one is bothered by the lethal damage that can be done downrange.
How A Bump Stock Works
Federal law effectively defines a machine gun as a firearm that can fire more than one bullet for one trigger squeeze.
A bump stock does not technically allow one squeeze of the trigger to fire multiple rounds.
Instead of pulling the trigger on a bump stock equipped weapon, one PUSHES the weapon forward using the front stock. That forward pressure pushes the trigger into the finger in the trigger guard and resting on the bump stock. Recoil ejects the spent shell and reloads the chamber.
The gun will continue firing at it’s maximum cyclic rate as long as there is ammunition in the magazine and the user maintains forward pressure.
You can hear just how fast that is in the above videos.
You’d think we could all agree a bump stock attached to a “modern sporting rifle” of the AR-15 pattern puts a machine gun in the hands of anyone with a few extra dollars to buy one or print one on a 3-D printer. But, we can’t.
Justifications for bump stocks are common from gun fans. One argument is the usual 600 rounds per minute maximum cyclic rate of an AR-15 of can be attained by squeezing the trigger 60 times per second.
There’s never any justification for the existence of a bump stock, though. Running through a complete magazine of any size in the blink of an eye is expensive and might be fun once. Any discussion should begin with refuting the fact a bump stock is only useful in a case where a lot of people were to be shot quickly.
Federal Bump Stocks Ban
The aftermath of the Las Vegas and Parkland massacres brought some federal progress.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms issued a rule that classified bump stocks and bump stock equipped weapons as machine guns. It was announced December 18, 2019.
We are faithfully following President Trump’s leadership by making clear that bump stocks, which turn semiautomatics into machine guns, are illegal, and we will continue to take illegal guns off of our streets.
Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker
The significance is that bump stock classification fits existing ATF licensing regulations for machine guns, discussed in Machine Guns-R-Us Part One.
Bump Stock Ban Is Under Fire
Challenges to the bump stock ban sprouted up around the country.
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver rejected a challenge.
The 6th Circuit Court in Cincinnati rejected a challenge.
The Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected a challenge.
Then, the 5th Circuit Court in New Orleans heard a case brought by gun rights activist Michael Cargill and decided the other way. The gist of their decision is a bump stock couldn’t necessarily be identified as “machine guns”, so the ban was invalid. The Gun Control Act of 1968 included language that includes “conversion kits” with typical machine guns for regulatory purposes.
The 5th Circuit opinion was appealed but the reversal of the ban remains effective for the states included in the 5th Circuit. The 6th Circuit later joined in the decision. This allowed vendors to sell bump stocks as long as the delivery of the item was in a physical location within Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. If you have $349 and an address in one of those states, you can convert your AR-15 to a what is in effect a fully automatic weapon.
A machine gun.
In 2022, the United States Supreme Court twice rejected appeals by gun rights advocates to kill the bump stock ban. The current Supreme Court with a 6-3 conservative majority has decided to hear the case in 2024.
Bump Stocks Aren’t Alone
In the third and final entry in the Machine Guns-R-Us series discusses other ways to cheaply and easily convert nearly any semi-automatic weapon into a full-automatic firearm. A machine gun.
None of it is a secret. It’s neither hard nor expensive to obtain weapons and extended magazines. The result? The destructive power on the streets outpaces law enforcement by an unknown but definitely non-zero factor.
The gun lobby remains powerful enough to tamp down news stories about gun violence much past the normal three or four days during and after a mass shooting event. It’s political poison for any Republican and many Democrats to touch the gun control issue in any meaningful way.
Be careful out there.
Research and Supporting Information
- ATF bump stock devices – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives
- After Parkland, States Pass 50 New Gun-Control Laws – Stateline
- With ‘conversion switch’ devices, machine guns return to U.S. streets – Washington Post
- Evaluation and Inspections Report I-2007-006 – Office of the Inspector General
- Data & Statistics – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
- US Supreme Court to decide legality of federal ban on gun ‘bump stocks’ – Reuter
- Supreme Court rejects gun rights challenge to bump stocks ban – NBC News