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Can Someone Explain This Bump Stock Thing to Me?
If I had to guess, the phrase “bump stock” is going to not only enter the national lexicon, but we’ll talk about incessantly for the upcoming weeks and months.
I don’t know for guns, so I looked it up. This is what the Wikipedia says:
Bump firing is the act of using the recoil of a semi-automatic firearm to fire shots in rapid succession, which simulates the feeling of a fully automatic firearm. This process involves bracing the rifle with the non-trigger hand, releasing the grip on the firing hand (leaving the trigger finger in its normal position in front of the trigger), pushing the rifle forward in order to apply pressure on the trigger from the finger, and keeping the trigger finger stationary. During a shot, the firearm will recoil (“bump” back) and the trigger will reset as it normally does; then the non-trigger hand pulls the firearm away from the body and back to the original position, pressing the trigger against the stationary finger again, thereby firing another round when the trigger is pushed back.
This technique is usually used for entertainment, as the drawback of decreased accuracy eliminates any conceivable “tactical” advantage that might be gained. However, when used in close proximity, the desired effect of many bullets hitting a target can easily be attained. Normally, a rifle is held securely and firmly against the shoulder but the loose shoulder hold that creates the rattle to rapidly depress the trigger affects accuracy that is not encountered with firearms that are designed for select-fire.
So they sell these things on the secondary market, you put it on your rifle, and it goes from there.
Okay, so, some questions:
First, just so I understand things correctly, once you start firing with this, can you stop? Or will the weapon keep firing until it’s out of ammo?
Second, doing this this destroys the accuracy. So other than “entertainment,” is there a practical use to these things?
Third, could you build your own at home and how difficult is it?
Obviously, I could research this, but not only is asking here quicker and I get details I wouldn’t otherwise, but we get to talk about it and everyone benefits.
Published in General
Others will probably do it much better than I, but simply put, the bump-stock allows the recoil from a semi-auto to provide the “mechanism” to have it act like a fully-auto. It works like this: you have a “sensitive” trigger and you place your finger on the trigger such that the recoil is used to “bump” the trigger against your finger simulating the automatic nature of a fully-auto. The bump stock is spring loaded so that you don’t lose any momentum from the recoil that you would with a regular stock. I think the bump stock can also be modified to provide added stability to the weapon as it is fired.
Now I am will step back and allow for more knowledgeable folks to explain this. I don’t use one and probably won’t ever use one simply because I don’t understand why you would want to. If you want a fully-auto, then go through the proper hoops to get one.
Yes, you just remove your finger from the trigger guard, but they do empty a mag fast so it’s not like you could stop at an exact number of rounds fired.
None. It really is just entertainment. Then regret when you calculate the cost of those few seconds of entertainment.
You can bump fire without a special stock, it just takes practice. Some guns will work better than others.
Here is a bump fire vs semi-auto. World class shooter on the semi-auto, but still.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddPTyoV-Irc
Robert’s got it right, maybe I can illustrate, with how I’ve unintentionally ‘bump fired’ my M1A in the past, since the physics are the same:
The M1A has a two stage trigger. That’s a trigger where there’s an easy takeup at the start, but then you meet a point of stronger resistance. If you pull the trigger past that point, the gun will fire. The idea is to allow accuracy since the final movement is very small and less likely to disturb the aim of the rifle. At the same time, relative safety is maintained when handling the rifle – there’s still that initial longer pull (the 1st stage) before it will fire.
Normally, if you are firing a string of shots you will briefly hold the trigger back once the gun has fired (follow-through) and then release it back to its breaking point, but no further (reset) for the next shot. That lets you fire more accurately and faster since you don’t do the long initial take-up over and over.
So far so good – one trigger pull, one shot and a new round loaded, this is how a semi-automatic works. But my M1A was initially too short for me, so I put a removable butt-pad on it, make of compressible foam. These are often used for recoil padding, but I just wanted more length. What could possibly go wrong?
Just this: physics works. The force of recoil will compress that pad, and then it will expand again after the recoil is done. If you haven’t held the trigger back far enough and long enough, the gun will have ‘reset’ and the expansion of the pad will push the whole gun and the trigger past the firing point again. Bang! That’s a bump fire. I had that happen to me a couple times unintentionally and it’s pretty startling – I soon replaced that squishy stock extension with a hard rubber one.
A bump fire stock just makes that intentional. Instead of a foam pad that accidentally becomes a spring, you’ve got a real spring and a design to make the ‘automatic’ continuous fire easier to control. Note the fundamental design of the rifle does not change – it’s doing the same thing it always did.
I’m going to hasten to add that outlawing bump fire stocks wouldn’t end unregistered automatics. Without going into details, on many rifles it’s pretty easy to alter the trigger mechanism so that it fires full auto. I once had a woman come to a class I was running with a brand new AR on which her boyfriend had ‘improved’ the trigger. He actually made it so unstable the rifle would go full auto unintentionally. I had to kick that rifle and shooter off the firing line. The knowledge of how to do that deliberately is not hard to come by, let’s say.
Shooting into a mass of people packed shoulder to shoulder in an area of maybe 75 yards by 50 yards (just wild guess on crowd size), accuracy isn’t necessary to inflict tremendous damage.
That’s true in this context. The one video of this I have seen thanks to Ben Shapiro seems as though Ray Charles could have come away with the same number of dead. Firing fully-auto without any kind of pattern (3-round burst or so) is meant to do one thing: get as much lead down range as quickly as you can to suppress. It’s really a maneuver tactic than anything. I pin you down so that one of my squad can move up and flank you. This guy was just pouring lead into sitting ducks.
The only thing I would add is that without the bump fire stock a person could fire nearly as quickly. The difference, even for someone without a lot of experience would be a couple of seconds for 30 rounds. I don’t think there is a serious argument that faster fire from modern small arms is more deadly in any real circumstance.
Yeah. I watched some videos of people doing this on YouTube. (One where they were trying to “melt down” an AR-15.) And all I could think about was the expense involved in all that ammo.
For an area target or suppressive fire, you can dump them at several per second no problem. It won’t be very accurate, but that’s not the point. Also, a few mag dumps at that rate of fire is going to have the rifle’s action and barrel extremely hot, to the point of being unusable. That may be one reason why the perp had so many rifles in his room, he was switching from one to the other as they overheated.
Just as a calibration point, a trained marksman can put an aimed round onto a man sized target at 500 yards once every 2-3 seconds. Accurate fire, not area suppression. I can do this, and I’m far from the best shooter in just my club. I can train anyone who’s not a complete klutz to do this, if they are willing to invest several thousand rounds and 40-80 hours.
Oh totally. In my op I was going to say “other than spraying into a tightly packed crowd,” but I’m just trying to establish the facts to my understanding.
I only heard a little of the LVMPD Sheriff say that the killer was firing from a distance of around 500 yards. If this is true, then a bump stock becomes virtually worthless, in terms of effective fire, after maybe two rounds at the most. Even in – line designs like the AR climb a little with each round. and the sights become next to worthless the moment the rifle starts to jump around.
Can someone address the effect of the muzzle brake on the operation of a bump stock, especially with the light recoil inherent with the .223 in a standard AR?
Bump stock is just a way to allow the recoil of the gun pull the trigger again so you get a faster rate of fire. It increases rate of fire but no way close to going full auto. You can also get the same effect by using a spring mechanism on the trigger and I know a few others that do the same by free floating the gun. Which is basically not holding the gun tightly and letting the recoil off your shoulder do what a bump stock does. All are sort of inaccurate. Just like full auto is but they can be fun to do if you want to play around, waste ammo and burn up your barrels.
In relation to this event. Bump stocks is getting lost in the weeds. It would not have increased the rate of fire enough to make a difference in this case.
You are invited to elaborate.
Average shooter is only a few seconds slower semi-auto vs bump fire. In the video I posted above you can see a world class shooter only slower by fractions of a second.
That’s impressive. So a bump stock can increase the rate of fire on a semi-auto enough to allow even a novice to match the speed of a world class shooter. If they were ten round magazines in the video, that’s not much slower than a true full automatic. (10 rounds/second vs. somewhere between 11 rounds/second and 16 rounds/second for the M4). My question is can that be done with the stock trigger on a AR-15 or does it has to be modified to have a lighter pull?
The world class shooter can go at that speed and hit designated targets. The average Joe can go nearly as fast, but is just slinging a lot of lead (which is still very destructive to an area target). A light trigger will help the expert with his control, won’t make as much difference to Joe since he isn’t really aiming in a true sense anyway.
Wouldn’t such techniques be difficult to maintain for very long, even for an experienced marksman? Given how many rounds were fired in this specific incident, it seems reasonable — perhaps likely — that the bumpstock played a significant role in the level of carnage.
Was it just me, or did it seem like there were *very* long pauses between bursts of fire (in the videos I’ve seen). Longer than I would expect (as a non-gun expert) would be required to reload or switch weapons.
No. I get that this is counter-intuitive, but that extra rate of fire at expense of accuracy makes the shooter less deadly, not more. At best equally deadly while the crowd is tightly packed.
Example. This guy is an excellent marksman if you are unfamiliar with him. He’s using actual full auto, which will have less of a decline in accuracy than bump fire.
I absolutely understand that. My point is that in the particular (and peculiar) circumstances of this murder spree, having a high rate of fire likely contributed to the high number of casualties.
Unless I’m very mistaken, he was not picking-off 600+ people individually, but shot rapidly (and without much need for accuracy) at a large crowd who had little cover.
I must not be making my point clearly. I understand your claim, and do not agree with it.
As evidence, about 1/10 of the wounded died. Had he fired semi-auto, and a fraction of the rounds, he would have killed far more people. It’s not even close.
He was less deadly than he otherwise would have been.
It’s going to be difficult to get data on this, but one of things I’d like to know is how many of the wounded were hit with ricochets and fragments.
The ratio of dead to wounded is startling low if you’ve seen the numbers, particularly for rifles. A majority of those hit by an Ar-15 will typically be killed. My suspicion is that the number actually directly struck is quite low compared to the rounds fired.
And his grouping is better.
I grant the point.
That crossed my mind as well, and point taken.
On the flip-side, we’re talking about unusually-long distances for a mass shooting. According to this chart, a .223 is going to lose something like
halfa third of its velocity after traveling the distances involved.I imagine that would make them rather less lethal per round than they would be in “normal” situations (though still plenty lethal).
A large crowd, little cover, and almost certainly a completely jammed and paniced situation on the ground. This wasn’t a prepared evacuation event like a test evacuation of an airliner – it was total mayhem. The majority of the crowd was almost certainly completely trapped after the first 30-60 seconds after folks started to move en masse. That made things much worse.
It wouldn’t be surprising if some of the deaths were from people getting trampled by the mass exit attempt and not related to gun fire.
I don’t feel the rate of fire contributed as much to the carnage as the large mass of people together in one place and just repeatedly shooting over a period of many minutes. I’d ready somewhere that it took close to an hour for the SWAT team to breech the hotel room – I don’t know if he was shooting during that entire time but even 10 minutes is a long time for people trapped in a relatively confined space.
Bumpfire stocks are notoriously inaccurate and difficult to control but he wasn’t aiming at anyone as you suggested – he was just firing indiscriminately into a packed area.
It would not be surprising if a some number of the injuries and even deaths are from people getting trampled at the exits – not that this is any consolation…
It would make them less lethal, though you are still talking over 2,000 feet per second. Traveling like an ak-47 round, but with less weight.
Still far more deadly more than Handgun rounds, of which normally 1/3 of the people shot are killed.
SirZog’s point about trampling injuries is well taken.
It can also make your shoulder sore, since it take the brunt of the recoil now instead. I have done this once and it wasn’t bad and kind of fun, but I would have hated to do it for more than just the 10 rounds I fired.
This is the fundamental problem with banning the Bump Stock the mechanics of the semi automatic gun is what makes it work. The stock is just a spring. If you wanted to prevent this kind of rapid fire you would need to ban semi automatic gun period. That way you have to manually cock the pin again, like with a bolt action gun or old time revolvers.
There are leaked photos out. One shows what was clearly two guns he used at his feet (there way have been more). One looks like a AR 15 the other (?), I don’t think they had bump stocks, they look more like the regular stocks. they did have supports and sights. The number of rounds fired would seem like auto mode was more likely. He had to get off much more than 500 rounds and bump seems too hard to control for that many. Also the sounds on the videos are very consistent like auto. Speaking of videos looks like he had caners set up to record his deed and to see when someone was outside the room. Another picture showed a large pile of rifles. The number of guns and ammo had to exceeded $20.000. Seems with all his prep and spending he would have been able to modify several to be fully auto.