Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
There are still a lot of people who are less than happy about the bump stock ban. In fairness, why wouldn’t they be? There was no grandfather clause, no ability to register bump stocks, no nothing for those who had them except to turn them over or destroy them.
Sure, a fair number of people probably did neither, but they’re not exactly going to talk about it, nor should they.
However, one man seemed determined to try and overturn the bump stock ban. Unfortunately, he just got a major setback.
A U.S. appeals court on Thursday ruled against a Utah gun rights advocate who challenged the Trump administration’s ban on bump stocks, the gun attachments that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns.
A three judge panel from the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver said a lower court was right to reject a request from Clark Aposhian to temporarily block the ban, which took effect last year, because he did not show he was likely to win his case. The appeals court also said he failed to show that blocking the ban would not hurt the public’s interest.
The decision came two months after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an appeal of the ban, enacted as a result of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas. A similar challenge to the ban is set to go to trial in July in Texas.
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In a solo dissent, Judge Joel Carson said the law only refers to the trigger itself, not any external action, pointing out that mechanical bump stocks require the shooter to apply constant forward pressure with their non-trigger hand and cannot function all by themselves as the law requires.
That’s a key point here.
You see, a machine gun is defined as a weapon that fires multiple rounds with a single pull of the trigger. A bump stock doesn’t change the way a semi-auto firearm functions. Instead, it merely facilitates pulling that semi-automatic trigger much, much faster.
As such, I fail to see how they can be classified as machine guns when they don’t meet the legal definition of such a weapon.
The problem is that after Las Vegas, no one wants to take the football. No one wants to earn the ire of the public by saying the weapon used to kill so many people and injured so many more not only was legal but will remain so.
What they don’t get is that bump fire is still perfectly legal and can be facilitated through the use of things like belt loops and rubber bands. The ban makes no one safer. It merely put a company out of business and deprived their previous customers out of property they purchased lawfully at the time. There was no compensation for that property, either.
They’ve accomplished nothing except to further alienate the group of people who are already tense enough and expecting further encroachments on their second amendment rights. No one is going to win if this ban stands, mark my words. The long term impact will not be the good supporters think it will be.
Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/
https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/05/08/man-loses-case-bump-stock-ban/