A bump stock is a kind of a gun stock that assists with rapid fire. They are of relatively recent origin (Past 20 years or so)
In 2002, one of the first bump stock-type devices was deemed by the ATF to not be a “machinegun”
The ATF ruled in 2010 that bump stocks were not a firearm subject to regulation
However, after the 2017 Las Vegas shooting in which a bump stock was specifically used to killed 58 people and wounded 422, public opinion turned against these gun stocks. I note that the bump stock was effective for it’s intended purpose; to assist a gunman in killing as many people in as short a time as possible.
Due to the public outcry, The Department of Justice proposed changes to the law which would reclassify bump stocks as “machineguns” and effectively ban the devices in the United States under existing federal law.
Therefore, Bump stocks are machine guns, under federal law. To claim that bump stocks ARE IN FACT guns, and were “grabbed” under this new interpretation of law is (in my mind) very bad reasoning.
Does this cover it?
In my opinion, bump stocks are NOT machine guns, but were classified as such to satisfy the public outcry, and get them banned quickly, by the expedient measure of using an existing law against machine guns to do so.
The only way Trump could get rid of bump stocks quickly was to do a gun grab.
I’m fairly certain that if Obama had done the same thing, people would be all “Obama is grabbing our guns, I told you this would happen!”.
Of course when the Obama administration eased requirements on buying machine guns, silencers and sawed off shotguns with 41P, no one really cared that much.
It is a bump stock grab, the owner only needs to destroy or turn in the bump stock. But federal law includes these stocks in their definition of a firearm. If Trump wanted the bump stocks gone, he could have also encouraged Congress to pass a law specifically banning them since they were, back then, not actually firearms protected by the 2nd amendment.
But Trump jumped on the anti-gun bandwagon and had the CFR’s changed to grab them right away.
Right, they made a quick and easy kludge to the system to bypass all the time and trouble of passing a law properly. Lazy but apparently rather effective, though possibly confusing to some.
As far as I can see, they could use an identical approach to illegalizing toasted bread.
According to the government: “Catfish means catfish grown as food for human consumption by a commercial operator on private property in water in a controlled environment”
So, whatever free range fish that looks like a catfish you have been catching, it’s not a catfish!
Because words mean what the government SAYS they mean!
WRT OP: legalistic terminology might (re)define items not traditionally or conventionally regarded as firearms; see MacTech’s post.
I can (I’m stretching a bit to do so) see MartinLane’s point about how government(s) can, with a stroke of a pen, redefine things in somewhat tortuous ways.
My own thinking is more conventional; bumpstocks and silencers (suppressors) are not firearms. See MacTech’s post.
Do you mean should it be legal? That’s a separate debate from whether or not those components are themselves firearms (in a colloquial, not legal sense).
There’s a wider debate on this, as you probably know. If we want to get academic, there’s nothing technically stopping a skilled crafter from purchasing steel, wood, plastic, etc and creating a firearm from scratch.
That part does happen to be regulated, as it happens, and the debates extend to the modern day with 3D printers which allow just about anybody to create firearms even without being especially handy.
If we leave the loaded terminology out of it, there is a valid debate to be had over the regulation of not only firearms themselves but individual components which can be assembled (easily or not) into a firearm. There’s room to argue over how much regulation is warranted, e.g. not much in the case of raw plugs of steel but perhaps more for replacement parts for existing models without which the firearm could not work. Bumpstocks and suppressors would fall in the middle. They are of limited utility without an already functioning firearm.
My argument is that a component essential for the function of a firearm should be regulated as a firearm.
And if an accessory turns one type of firearm into a different, more strictly regulated type of firearm, then I think it is justifiable to regulate that accessory as a firearm.
If you want to call it something else and still regulate it the same way, I guess that’s OK, but seems like a waste of paperwork.
Perhaps there is already an existing framework (laws and rules) for regulating firearms, and it’s much easier to add an item to the list of “firearms” than to create a completely new category of regulated items? The effect will be the same, so why should anyone care?
I’m suggesting that as a possible explanation. Unless you know of a category of firearm accessories that are regulated as strictly as actual firearms, without being referred to as firearms?
Words have specific meaning in specific laws that may not conform to logic or colloquial use of the term. If the Supreme Court says tomatoes are vegetables (for the purpose of import tariffs), there’s no point in using a biology textbook to refute it.
Don’t get me wrong - in my capacity as a computer programmer I have on occasion called a spade a shovel and a square a circle in order to save time and reuse existing code. And it always feels dirty. Just fix the code properly!
And with law it seems even more skeevy, because it seems like it would have significant potential to twist the law to say what it’s not intended to say. I mean, say I wanted to reinstitute prohibition, and didn’t want to bother with that pesky “amendment” thing. Oh, you say that if I define a case of beer as a “machinegun” I don’t even have to ask congress…?
You think that’s improbable? Okay, so how about I decide I want to be able to come down hard on ganja users/sellers. All I gotta do is call it Schedule 1, and it’ll be super-illegal forever, evidence be damned!