Gun Owners of America is preparing to file a lawsuit once the Trump administration puts bump stock gun control in place.
On March 10, 2018, Breitbart News reported that the Department of Justice was finalizing its bump stock ban. It will center on a redefinition of the term “machine gun” in order to allow regulatory action against firearm accessories that do not convert semiautomatic firearms in automatics.
In other words, the term “machine gun” will cover machine guns and non-machine guns, conversion devices that turn semiautomatics into automatics as well as firearm accessories, like bump stocks, that do not.
On January 23, 2018, Breitbart News reported that former ATF Gun Tech Chief Rick Vasquez warned that re-working and re-defining terms to achieve a bump stock ban will lead to other bans.
He explained that ATF was, at that time, handling the initial phase of formulating the ban. He told the Military Arms Channel the ban would be “a regulation with the strength of a law.”
He said it will ban “any device that automatically resets a firearm and enhances the rate of fire,” and warned that such an approach would be “extremely broad.”
He observed, “They are trying to target binary triggers, [bump stock] devices, and other devices, but that is such broad language, can I take that to a Gatling gun? … So now you start stretching this [new] definition, and who is going to decide what the [standard] rate of fire is?”
Vasquez’s warnings came roughly two weeks after Gun Owners of America (GOA) warnedthat the Trump administration’s bump stock gun control would lead to other controls.
They suggested that an ATF powerful enough to arbitrarily redefine words so as to ban legal firearm accessories is an ATF that will not stop with bump stocks. They predicted that another crisis could lead to another redefinition which would allow the ATF to swoop in for magazines and aftermarket triggers too.
GOA executive director Erich Pratt told Breitbart News:
GOA is committed to fighting any regulation or ban on bump stocks. This issue goes far beyond stocks, because regulating devices that allegedly increase the rate of fire of a firearm can eventually be applied to match triggers, magazines or semi-automatic firearms. In essence, a bump stock ban opens the door to regulate and ban commonly-owned firearms and firearm parts. A ban on bump stocks would have huge implications for the exercise of our gun rights, and that is why GOA is already looking ahead to a lawsuit challenging the regulation.
GOA is pledging to file a lawsuit against bump stock gun control as soon as it is enacted.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.