Tag: ATF

Bump Stocks Get First Hearing in Senate, Dealt Another Blow in House

The following article by Griffin Connolly was posted on the Roll Call website December 7, 2017:

ATF has begun process to re-evaluate bump stock classification, lawmakers told

Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, held a hearing Wednesday that addressed bump stocks, making good on a promise after the Las Vegas shooting. Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call

More than two months after the Las Vegas shooting, the deadliest in U.S. history, the Senate Judiciary committee held a long-awaited hearing addressing the bump stock devices the shooter used to kill more than 50 people and injure hundreds more.

“ATF’s authority to regulate firearms is of course limited by the terms of [the 1934 and 1968 firearms laws], and they do not empower ATF to regulate parts or accessories designed to be used with firearms,” Thomas E. Brandon, the acting director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), told lawmakers.

For the ATF to legally regulate bump stocks under current legislation, the devices would need to be classified as “machine guns,” Brandon indicated.

A legal review process launched this week to determine whether bump stocks fall within the definition of “machine guns” will take months. Continue reading “Bump Stocks Get First Hearing in Senate, Dealt Another Blow in House”

As GOP Passes Buck on Bump Stocks, ATF Pushes Back

NOTE: This and recent articles on Rep. Ryan backing away from this issue makes us wonder if Rep. Paulsen saying he supports the effort was a “run to the middle” on an issue he knew would go nowhere.  That’s his typical behavior as an election approaches.  

The following article by Griffin Connolly was posted on the Roll Call website October 25, 2017:

Antoinette Cannon, who worked as a trauma nurse and treated victims of the mass shooting in Las Vegas, leaves a rose at each of the 58 white crosses at a makeshift memorial on the south end of the Las Vegas Strip earlier this month. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Efforts to ban bump stocks have come to a screeching halt, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives once again indicating it does not have the authority to reclassify and regulate the devices.

The ATF wrote letters in 2010 and 2013 explaining how current laws — the Gun Control Act (1968) and National Firearms Act (1934) — do not provide an avenue for the bureau to regulate the gun attachments, which enable shooters to fire semiautomatic weapons at nearly the rate of automatic ones.

Continue reading “As GOP Passes Buck on Bump Stocks, ATF Pushes Back”