A previous Justice Department review, done by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, was prompted by the mass shooting last fall in Las Vegas, where a gunman killed 58 people using semiautomatic weapons outfitted with bump stocks. By working around the A.T.F.’s earlier interpretation, the Justice Department essentially said that the statute had not changed, but that it could now be read in a different way. By reinterpreting the conclusion that was made under President Barack Obama, the Justice Department could open itself up to lawsuits when the rule is finalized. “People designed it this way deliberately to keep bump stocks from being defined as machine guns under the statute. Before the Justice Department issued any measures of its own, Mr. Trump had publicly declared that he would use executive authority to ban bump stocks, and he ordered the department to find a way to prohibit them.

Source: New York Times March 23, 2018 21:14 UTC