President Obama never tried to go this far when it comes to guns.
At President Trump’s direction, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has just announced a new regulation making the “bump stock” illegal. No congressional authority sought. Out of the box and in as little as fifteen minutes, the bump stock can make a semi-automatic rifle perform a lot like a machine gun — no gunsmithing required.
It is the position of the Washington Examiner that the bump stock should be banned. Lawmakers decided long ago to effectively outlaw the machine gun through the National Firearms Act. Like poison gas or the bomb, fully automatic rifles are weapons of indiscriminate destruction. The bump stock worked around the law without violating it to allow shooters to achieve the same high rate of fire.
How does the bump stock actually work? Click here for a primer.
For as little as $99 or as much as $400, shooters could make use of this loophole. Until pulling bump stocks from their shelves, Cabela’s promised that the Slide Fire guaranteed “a lifetime of rapid-firing fun.” And until going out of business, that manufacturer shipped each bump stock with a letter from the ATF guaranteeing the legality of the device.
It was the Obama ATF that said that the bump stock didn’t violate the NFA because the device “has no automatically functioning parts or springs and performs no automatic mechanical function when installed.” It might make a semi-automatic AR-15 fire like a fully-automatic M-16. But those Obama regulators went by the book and determined the devices were in line with the law.
After a monster used rifles equipped with bump stocks to kill 58 people and wound another 851 though, it became the position of this paper that Congress should pass a law banning the devices. A quick fix could close the loophole and regulate bump stocks like machine guns. No damage to the rule of law necessary.
Rather than do their job, Congress decided to avoid the political liabilities that come with deliberation and debate. They shrugged and shoved the problem off on unelected bureaucrats at the Department of Justice and ATF. It was, as Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., said at the time, “the height of legislative malpractice.”
This wasn’t for a lack of trying. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced legislation to make the devices legal. It was for a lack of courage. Republicans in the House and the Senate refused to consider legislation even after Trump endorsed a ban.
Because of that congressional cowardice, Trump yielded to political pressure. This week acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker announced new regulation that will take effect next March. Gun owners will have 90 days to destroy or surrender the devices to the ATF. While this is the desired result, it is the exact wrong way to achieve it.
Essentially the Trump ATF contradicted the Obama ATF, rewriting the law all by itself. As Joshua Prince and Adam Kraut, lawyers representing the Firearms Policy Coalition, noted in comments on the rule, and Jacob Sullum first reported in Reason magazine, the DOJ’s “interpretative jiggery-pokery” is “pure applesauce.”
Set aside the legal zingers, the problem with the new rule is that it is completely arbitrary.
“An individual does not require a bump stock device in order to bump fire a factory semi-automatic firearm,” Prince and Kraut write. “ATF readily acknowledges that bump firing can be lawfully achieved through the ‘use [of] rubber bands, belt loops, or [to] otherwise train their trigger finger to fire more rapidly,’ in a clear statement of its intent to unequally apply the law.”
It is also establishing an ugly precedent. When Congress doesn’t legislate, regulators become lawmakers unto themselves. This time, they have taken the pulse of the people more or less correctly. But they are getting into the habit of rewriting rules. President Kamala Harris or President Joe Biden will be more than happy to put them to work ruling this or that illegal by fiat.
The current administration doesn’t seem concerned with that possibility. Trump wanted a win and so Trump directed his administration to go it alone. Law and order be damned.
