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Trump and Bump Stocks: Shrewd Strategy or Fortuitous Improvisation?
On October 1, 2017, a mass murderer killed 58 people by firing at them from an elevated position in Las Vegas. Over 800 were injured. Stephen Paddock was found, an apparent suicide on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel. He had a reported 23 firearms, of which 12 had bump stocks installed. In the audio recordings of the event, the firing sounds much like automatic weapons fire.
President Trump had been in office for less than ten months. The calls for immediate legislation to ban bump stocks, the details of which included bans on virtually all semi-automatic firearms, were loud. Congressional resistance to the media onslaught existed but was in the minority. The NRA called for the ATF to study the situation and remedy it with regulation if necessary. President Trump said he would consider regulation. From factcheck.org:
Several days after the shooting, Trump was asked if bump stocks should be banned, and he vowed his administration would “be looking into that over the next short period of time.”
The NRA seemed supportive of the idea. NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre and NRA political strategist Chris Cox issued a statement saying, “The NRA believes that devices designed to allow semiautomatic rifles to function like fully-automatic rifles should be subject to additional regulations.”
The New York Times, a reliably far-left promoter of ever more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, published this on November 8, 2017:
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