CLAIM: Sen. Chris Murphy used a post on X Tuesday to claim Donald Trump refused to ban bump stocks.I'm not going to mince words. By refusing to ban bump stocks and assault weapons, Donald Trump and Republicans are handing killers the tools of mass slaughter.The bump stock ban was announced in 2018, Trump’s second year in office, and went into effect March 26, 2019.
The ban occurred in response to the October 1, 2017, Las Vegas shooting, in which a bump stock was criminally used in a heinous firearm-based attack. Many gun rights groups and organizations around the country were, with Utah Shooting Sports Council’s Clark Aposhian saying of the Trump administration, “They were just looking for a scapegoat and they found one.”
As the ATF has done in so many instances, they secured the ban on bump stocks by equating the firearm accessories with “machineguns.” The Department of Justice is amending the regulations of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to clarify that bump-stock-type devices–meaning “bump fire” stocks, slide-fire devices, and devices with certain similar characteristics–are “machineguns” as defined by the National Firearms Act of 1934 and the Gun Control Act of 1968 because such devices allow a shooter of a semiautomatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger.