House Speaker Paul Ryan called Monday for a “regulatory fix” to end the sale of “bump stocks,” which were used in the deadly Vegas shooting earlier this month.
“We think the regulatory fix is the smartest, quickest fix,” Ryan, R-Wis., said when asked about bipartisan legislation introduced Tuesday that would ban the devices. The devices can be attached to semi-automatic weapons in order to use the recoil action of the weapon to make it fire faster, and many say they effectively turn these weapons into automatics.
Lawmakers in the House and Senate have filed bills making it illegal to sell bump stocks, which attach to semi-automatic weapons and work to accelerate the rate of fire to that of an automatic weapon. The devices were exempted from a law banning automatic weapons by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in 2010.
Ryan suggested that the first step is to see what can be done through regulation.
“We are still trying to assess why the [BATF] let this go through in the first place,” Ryan said. “What happened on the regulatory side. It makes sense that this is a regulation that probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”
On Tuesday, Reps. Carlos Curbelo, R-Fla., and Seth Moulton, D-Mass., introduced a bill banning the sale of bump stocks.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced a similar bill in the Senate last week.
