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No, I'm glad it's going this way because now we get more focus on the currently-stupid law. I'm hoping that Republicans can find one or two full spines between themselves and actually get a real concession from Democrats in order to pass a bump stock ban: get suppressors and/or SBRs off the NFA. Reopen the machine gun registry is another reasonable step, but that's probably asking too much for this moment.
I would bet almost any sum of money the Dems would rather not fix it and just be sensationalist about the Court and the GOP in Congress.
The Senate Democratic side tried to push a bill that would have banned both bump stocks and anything that could "materially increases the rate of fire of the firearm". On one hand, they tried to push it through using unanimous consent that they definitely weren't going to get, so perhaps it is just for the sensationalism. On the other hand, they did include that portion, which might as well ban gunsmithing entirely: either they have so little familiarity with the topic as to believe that a resistance to such a ban would be just as sensational, or they actually want it, and a lot of them also say at length that they actually want it.
Why write a quality bill if you know it's DOA in the hosue. You've only got so many good legislative wizards. You don't put the A team (or even a team with a passing familiarity with a topic) on a symbolic bill that has no chance of becoming law. Those folks are working on things that might actually matter.
Trivially, because any opponents of future gun bills can credibly claim that the Democratic party wants to ban a wide variety of common semiautomatic firearm modifications, and point to this poorly written bill. Because even if you were grandstanding, it's more useful to grandstand in a way that doesn't give your opponents a ton of ammunition. And because leaving people without passing familiarity with a topic to write legal text with criminal penalties doesn't sound much better if you didn't intend for it to pass.
100% correct, but unfortunately I don't think it matters. Opponents of future gun bills are going to claim that whether it's credible or not.
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It's possible, but the problem there is that this is, long-term, likely to be a win for the Gun Culture. Gun Control is driven by sensationalized claims about the negative outcomes if the control schemes aren't implemented or maintained, and Gun Culture spreads by arguing that guns are fucking awesome, you should totally get one yourself. Gun control advocates claimed that concealed carry would result in turning our streets into warzones, but that didn't happen in the states that implemented concealed carry early, and the more states that went for it, the weaker the argument got. The same will happen with bump stocks.
The likely outcome of the decision is that the large majority of the gun culture buys one of these stocks, and then nothing statistically significant happens as a result. They get completely normalized, and banning them becomes completely impossible in any practical sense. This isn't helped by the fact that you can built an entirely-workable bump stock in about ten minutes out of cardboard and hot-glue. A motivated ten year old could do it as an arts and crafts project, it's that easy. Nor is the state of the art standing still; the gun culture is continuing to proliferate designs for pseudo-autofire, and those designs are only increasing in sophistication. As difficult as it might be to believe, the Gun Culture has not, historically, been terribly optimized for direct culture war. That is changing rapidly, and the low-hanging fruit for increased coordination and solidarity, practical lawfare, malicious compliance, and erosion of systemic control is plentiful.
Bump stocks won't proliferate too much for the simple reason that they don't work very well. I suspect that drilling 1/8 inch holes would become a popular hobby if the ATF was permanently defunded, but autofire simulators are sufficiently bad at their job for it to be unlikely for them to catch on.
I think it’s just the bump stocks that are uniquely fiddly in their use. The other ways to go full semi-auto seem to be a lot more polished (as they’re just triggers with so much extra slap they push themselves past their reset point).
I also think that most people haven’t figured out the ways to use full-auto effectively, and as people figure out what it’s actually good for and design new calibers around that system I think it’ll gain more adoption. .22TCM is perhaps the best candidate at present (not exactly widely available and it’s basically just really short .221 Fireball) but .32ACP, .30 Super Carry, and .22LR are also the most improved by being able to put half a shotshell worth of pellets into a man-sized target at 50 yards.
I’m not sure how long it’s going to take people to realize that; but I don’t think it’s that novel a proposition.
Im just going to leave this here.
One round of .22LR is just a single pellet of #4 buckshot, one round of .32 ACP is just a single pellet of #00 buckshot. Thus, anything that a shotgun is effective on can, trivially, be killed by .22LR.
The vz. 61 Skorpion is the ultimate successor to the double-barrel shotgun and it's sad that nobody really realizes it (except for Eastern European crime gangs who use it specifically for that reason). That is the PDW that should have replaced the S&W K frame in the bedside drawers of America, and I'm sure it eventually would have were it not for the NFA.
It will never cease to amaze me that the American-180 is arguably a better combat shotgun than most of what passes for "combat shotgun" today simply because you can reload it this century, where being able to put rounds exactly where you want them to go is a nice bonus (pro tip: if your shotgun doesn't have a box magazine, it's not a combat shotgun no matter how many velcro strips you put on it; Benelli/Beretta shotguns are inherently all cope guns).
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Gun Control can just do another Las Vegas, if you're of the paranoid mindset.
Even if they can get another law passed, it doesn't matter much if a huge proportion of the gun-owning population already owns bump-stocks and are not inclined to give them up. It's the same thing we saw with the assault weapons ban under Clinton; before, autoloading rifles were somewhat marginal in the culture, and a lot of gun owners weren't interested in them. By the time the ban expired, the AR-15 was America's Rifle, and adoption absolutely exploded as soon as the ban came down. They'll never get another bite at that apple.
I'd expect the same pattern to play out for bump stocks. Back when the ban was being debated, I wrote a post arguing that maybe bump stocks weren't actually something we should defend all that hard, and that maybe, just this once, we should possibly consider that the proposed restrictions might be reasonable. given what has happened since then, I will never make nor accept an argument like that ever again, and I think my experience generalizes.
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