The Trump administration has moved to officially ban bump stocks, which allow semi-automatic weapons to fire rapidly like automatic firearms, and has made them illegal to possess beginning in late March. The devices will be banned under a federal law that prohibits machine guns, a senior Justice Department official said on Tuesday.
Bump stocks became a focal point of the national gun control debate after they were used in October 2017 when a man opened fire from his Las Vegas hotel suite at a crowd at a country music concert below, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history.
The regulation, which was signed by acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker on Tuesday morning, will go into effect 90 days after it is formally published in the Federal Register, which is expected to happen on Friday, the Justice Department official said. The official wasn’t authorised to discuss the matter publicly before the regulation’s formal publication and spoke to the Associated Press news agency on condition of anonymity. Other US media publications also reported the news of the regulation. In March, President Donald Trump said his administration would “ban” the devices, which he said “turn legal weapons into illegal machines” Shortly after the president’s comments, the Justice Department announced that it had started the process to amend federal firearms regulations to define bump stocks as machine guns. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives sought public comment on the proposal, drawing more than 35,000 comments.
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
Source: aljazeera.com
Tuesday, May 5, 2026
