No matter how one feels about bump stocks on firearms, the Supreme Court made the right call. The technical definition of a machine gun, and the one that gun owners are held to: a weapon that fires more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.
A bump stock fitted to a semi-auto firearm fires only one shot per trigger pull, so it cannot be termed a machine gun. The spring-loaded mechanism that causes the entire arm to bounce back and forth against the shooter’s trigger finger allows the rapid rate of fire. The spray of shots that result is wasteful of both money and ammunition, but the arm is still not, by law, a machine gun.
If a change in law outlawed arms capable of firing more than a specific number of rounds per minute, the Court would have had something to work with.
Such a law would not upset me; I consider the device a means of wasting time and cartridges while playing Rambo.
— Don Neal
Anchorage
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