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Sanity Prevails Once Again
I mentioned on Dave Carter’s podcast last week that Diane Feinstein’s terrible, no good, awful “bump stock” bill had a zero percent chance of passing, and it looks like that prediction is correct.
The failure of lawmakers to move bump stock legislation comes despite the willingness of several House Republicans to sign on to the measure. A bill introduced by Reps. Carlos Curbelo (R-FL) and Seth Moulton (D-MA) has 20 co-sponsors in total—ten Democratic and ten Republican. But aides say that there is no indication that the House Judiciary Committee is going to consider that bill, or a similar one signed by 173 Democrats.
Feinstein’s bill is a train wreck. The language in it is simple, yet deceiving. By banning way anything that would”accelerate the rate of fire of a semi- automatic rifle,” her bill could potentially ban such innocuous items as a new trigger for a kid’s .22 rifle or a newer, lighter bolt carrier group for an otherwise legal AR-15. Also, because it limits itself to rifles only, it wouldn’t work if it were able to be passed, because according to the BATFE, this is a pistol, and this is a rifle. One is therefore ok for a bump stock, and the other is not.
Understand that difference? Me neither, but those are the rules that the BATFE has to live with, thanks to the National Firearms Act.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (and really big fires) took a look at the gadget in question, the Slide-Fire stock, and determined that because it used the momentum of the rifle itself to reset the finger on the trigger faster, it was was not a device that turned a semi-automatic rifle into a full auto rifle. This ruling came down when Obama was President and Eric Holder was in charge of the Justice Department, and it looks like the BATFE is going to stand by their original finding and not change the law for everyone based on one man’s misuse of an otherwise legal device.
Good. The laws on these devices haven’t changed since 2013, and therefore, the regulations on them shouldn’t change either. After eight long years of living under a Justice Department who showed open contempt for the rule of law, it’s nice to have the adults back in charge once more.
Published in Guns
Kevin, those two reference pix of a pistol and rifle are perfect. Which one is an “assault” weapon? Snigger…
Ah, finally some sanity. Looking at the wording of the Curbelo-Moulton bill, I didn’t see that it actually would have banned the use of a slide fire stock anyway. The slide fire stock does not allow one to actually increase the theoretical maximum rate of fire, since that is really limited to the guts of the firearm doing their business up to a maximum rate. It may have made the practical rate faster for some people, but it could also result in jamming which slows down the overall rate. Had the old boy in Vegas used a lever action carbine with goodies to keep the barrel cool, he likely could’ve had at least the kill total he already had, if not more with nearly 150 year old technology.