The Trump administration was right to ban "bump stocks."
Now Congress should confirm the sensible step by passing legislation to ban the devices, which can transform semi-automatic rifles into automatic rifles.
A bump stock was used by the killer in the October 2017 Las Vegas shooting that slaughtered 58 people and wounded hundreds of others attending a country music concert.
That tragedy was a "9/11" of mass shootings, said David Chipman, a senior policy adviser at Giffords, a gun-safety organization co-founded by former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona, who was shot in 2011 while meeting with constituents.
Chipman, who served 25 years as an agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said a concern with the administration ban is that "in a regulatory approach it would be subject to loopholes that the industry could work around, and it would be the subject of lawsuits."
In fact, the Gun Owners of America filed suit against the regulation, which its executive director said in a statement "clearly violates federal law, as bump stocks do not qualify as machine guns under the federal statute."
The National Rifle Association, long a stalwart ally of President Donald Trump, has not filed suit — yet. But it expressed its disapproval in a statement that read in part, "We are disappointed that this final rule fails to address the thousands of law-abiding Americans who relied on prior ATF determinations when lawfully acquiring these devices."
The Department of Justice's final rule referred to by the NRA states that "these devices convert an otherwise semiautomatic firearm into a machine gun by functioning as a self-acting or self-regulating mechanism that harnesses recoil energy of the semiautomatic firearm in a manner that allows the trigger to reset and continue firing without additional physical manipulation of the trigger by the shooter."