The Trump administration has officially banned bump stocks and the ban will take effect in three months. Which means you can’t even own one. If you do, you have to surrender it to the ATF or destroy it. You won’t be grandfathered in:
DAILY MAIL – The Trump administration moved Tuesday to officially ban bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms, and has made them illegal to possess beginning in late March.
The devices will be banned under a federal law that prohibits machine guns, according to a senior Justice Department official.
Bump stocks became a focal point of the national gun control debate after they were used in October 2017 when a man opened fired from his Las Vegas hotel suite into a crowd at a country music concert below, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The regulation, which was signed by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Tuesday morning, will go into effect 90 days after it is formally published in the Federal Register, which is expected to happen on Friday, the Justice Department official said.
The official wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly ahead of the regulation’s formal publication and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
People who own bump stocks will be required to either surrender them to the ATF or destroy them by late March, the official said.
Gun Owners of America plan to file a lawsuit to challenge the new regulation:
“As written, this case has important implications for gun owners since, in the coming days, an estimated half a million bump stock owners will have the difficult decision of either destroying or surrendering their valuable property, or else risk felony prosecution,” said Erich Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America.
He said the group planned to challenge the ban in court. Another gun rights group, the Firearms Policy Coalition, filed a lawsuit Tuesday to block the rule in federal court in Washington.
It’s one thing to ban the production or sale of bump stocks. It’s another thing to force people to turn them in, destroy them or face federal charges.
I’ll be interested to see where this goes in the courts.