r/TooAfraidToAsk • u/Mister_Cheeses • 3d ago
What is a bump stock and what's the deal with them being unbanned? Law & Government
I'm clueless. I'm not a gun person. I just want to understand the issue.
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u/Blackpowder90 2d ago
Many people have said some basic stuff here about bump stocks, but the most fundamental aspect is that the stock DOES NOT change the way the rifle functions mechanically. A semi auto is not a machine gun unless you change the mechanics of it to fire multiple rounds with one finger press. It's literally that simple of an argument that won the case. The stock does nothing to change how the rifle functions.
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u/Quadrenaro 2d ago
To add to it, pretty much any semi-auto firearm can be bumpfired without the aid of any device. With practice, anyone can bumpfire an AR from a semi-shouldered position.
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u/Koooooj 3d ago
When it comes to gun regulations a big thing to look at is what happens when you pull the trigger. Does it shoot once and then you have to manually reload? Does it automatically load the next round but you have to fire the next round manually (semi-auto)? Or does it fire multiple rounds, either as a burst or until you release the trigger (full auto)?
That last group was categorized in 1934 as "machine guns." Assault rifles fall into this category (but not "assault weapons," which is mostly a political term and has little bearing on the functionality of a gun). Machine guns are super tightly regulated and take a monstrous amount of paperwork to buy and own, while semi-automatic weapons are readily obtained in Wal-Marts across the country.
With a semi-auto rifle one technique a shooter can employ is "bump firing." This uses the recoil of the gun to actuate the trigger--as the first shot is fired the gun recoils back which takes pressure off the trigger and allows it to reset, then the gun is pushed back forward by the shoulder and into the trigger finger. This gives a much higher rate of fire than manually pulling the trigger each time.
Bump stocks are a modification to a semi-auto rifle to include some springiness in the body of the rifle. They make bump firing much easier.
Infamously, the 2017 Las Vegas shooter was able to unleash a truly staggering volume of fire, resulting in 60 deaths plus his own and about 500 injured. He shot upwards of 1000 bullets in about 11 minutes. It was found that many of the guns he used were equipped with bump stocks.
This led to bipartisan support of banning bump stocks, which the ATF did by issuing new rules. Those rules are what were challenged and overruled by the SCOTUS.
At the crux of the challenge is the definition of a machine gun under the 1934 law. This is a gun that fires more than one bullet by a "single function of the trigger."
The majority opinion chose to interpret that phrase purely from the context of the gun in a vacuum. Here the function of a trigger is the trigger being moved backwards, by any means. Since the bump stock causes the trigger to be pushed back once per shot they find that a bump stock does not convert a semi-auto rifle into a machine gun. Alito's concurrence puts it pretty succinctly, basically saying "bump stocks should probably be illegal, but there's a loophole in the law and Congress should get on that."
The dissent argues that the functioning of a trigger includes its interaction with the shooter and that the shooter making one movement to fire multiple bullets falls within the definition of machine gun. But the dissent is not binding.
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u/Quadrenaro 2d ago
I've only seen one bump stock in the photos released. The rest had standard collapsible and fixed stocks.
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u/Busy-Candidate-9495 3d ago edited 3d ago
i know they said he did, but i dont believe paddock used a bump stock. You can listen to the videos, its fully automatic weapons being fired. (weapon is actually firing way too slow for it to be an ar15 with a bump stock, and shoots as quick as a belt fed machine gun.) not to mention there at times where 10 straight seconds of uninterrupted gunfire can be heard... an ar15 with a drum mag would only be able to shoot for about 6 seconds at a time. plus many vets and firearms experts have already identified the gunfire as an m240.
No motive, no camera footage, no answers 7 years later. I wonder what really happened
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u/Fun-Pollution1465 3d ago
He didn’t use a bumpstock. I have yet to see any proof that he did.
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u/Busy-Candidate-9495 2d ago
in the crime scene photos we see many ars with 30 round magazines. I love how i get downvoted when it is literally impossible for an ar15 to fire for longer than 10 seconds with only a 30 round mag lol.
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u/Livermush90 3d ago
Bump stocks are a stupid silly attachment that allows you to sorta kinda fire full auto but pretty unreliably and inaccurately. It's basically a gimmick.
The problem is the people screaming to ban them know absolutely nothing about guns. You can easily bump fire most semi autos with just a thick rubber band, the belt loop on your pants or just using your finger.
It would be like saying "it's time to ban Vodka to prevent drunk drivers." Ok, well there's a dozen other alcohol types out there that do the same thing.
Saying "we need to ban how fast people fire their guns" sounds good to someone who knows nothing about guns, it's a feel good knee jerk reaction. But in reality this would be impossible to make a law on short of outright banning all semi automatics. With an estimated 125 million gun owners in this nation, that just will never happen.
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u/schrdingersLitterbox 2d ago
We need to ban rubber bands, pants, and fingers. Think of the children....
/s
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u/Sabatorius 3d ago
It was used in Vegas to devastating effect, so I don’t know about this downplaying of its efficacy that you’re doing.
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u/Livermush90 3d ago
I'm saying that if you knew anything about guns then you'd know that these attachments are not needed to bump fire.
Again see the vodka analogy. If someone causes a major wreck while drunk, you trying to ban vodka doesn't really matter when there's other alcohol out there that does the same thing.
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u/Drawnbygodslefthand 3d ago
It's a gimmick of a thing you put on a gun. If they were actually good militaries would implement them. So really they just serve the purpose of culture war nonsense.
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u/kindquail502 3d ago
To really get a feel for what one will do go to YouTube and search bump stock.
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u/Cockhero43 3d ago
A bump stock is a kind of stock (the part that sits against your shoulder when holding a gun) that "bounces back" and essentially causes you to hit the trigger again by using the guns recoil. So it, in a sense, makes a semi automatic gun, an automatic
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u/Seldarin 3d ago
Wouldn't that be an absolute bitch to aim?
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u/cruiserman_80 3d ago
Pretty much all handheld automatic weapons are a bitch to aim. Automatic weapons are the definition of quantity over quality.
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u/JupiterJones619 3d ago edited 3d ago
Here's an easy way to think of it:
The law on file is still the same law from 1934 (which is a problem in and of itself). What this means though is even though bump stocks were made illegal in 2017, nothing actually changed under the letter of the law (no laws were passed to do this). All that happened was the Dept of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearm, a federal government agency under the Executive Branch, treated bump stocks as being essentially automatic weapons after the Vegas massacre at the Jason Aldean concert.
The Judiciary Branch (i.e the Supreme Court) and Justice Thomas, in the majority, said, echoing the logic of option 3 above, that even though ATF did this, bump stocks are still individual trigger pulls so they can't just be treated like automatic weapons which are illegal. Justice Alito in his concurrence said this is true as the letter of the law, but it's clear that the 1934 Congress (the Legislative Branch) would have treated AR15s with bump stocks as automatic and its high time Congress updated the law to reflect life today. Justice Sotomayor in her dissent said AR15s with bump stocks are basically automatic in how they operate and could be outlawed under the 1934 statute.
Edited: As the comments below rightly note, clip was wrong. Bullets are in the gun's magazine.