It’s been over a year since the Las Vegas massacre, but the Trump administration has decided to officially ban bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms.
The devices will be banned under a federal law that prohibits machine guns, and they will be illegal to possess beginning in late March.
Bump stocks became a focal point of the national gun control debate after they were used in October 2017 when a man opened fired from his Las Vegas hotel suite into a crowd at a country music concert below, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds more in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.
The regulation, which was signed by Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker this morning, will go into effect 90 days after it is formally published in the Federal Register, which is expected to happen on Friday.
The amended regulations reverse a 2010 ATF decision that found bump stocks did not amount to machine guns and could not be regulated unless Congress changed existing firearms law or passed a new one.
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, there was a growing push by some members of Congress to ban bump stocks, but no legislation was passed.
At least 10 states have sought their own restrictions on the devices.
People who own bump stocks will be required to either surrender them to the ATF or destroy them by late March.
The amended rule was met almost immediately with resistance from gun rights advocates, including Gun Owners of America, which said it would file a lawsuit against the Justice Department and ATF in order to protect gun owners from the “unconstitutional regulations.”
“These regulations implicate Second Amendment rights, and courts should be highly suspect when an agency changes its ‘interpretation’ of a statute in order to impair the exercise of enumerated constitutional rights,” the organization’s executive director, Erich Pratt, said.
Police said the gunman in the Las Vegas massacre, Stephen Paddock, fired for more than 10 minutes using multiple weapons outfitted with target scopes and bump stocks.
Paddock fatally shot himself after the shooting and there were 23 assault-style weapons, including 14 fitted with rapid-fire “bump stock” devices, strewn about the room near his body on the floor of his 32nd-floor hotel suite at the Mandalay Bay casino-hotel.
The largest manufacturer of bump stocks, Slide Fire Solutions, announced in April that it was going to stop taking orders and shutting down its website.
The remaining stock of the devices is now being sold by another company, RW Arms, based in Fort Worth, Texas.