Below is the comment which I submitted to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives regarding the proposed legislation that would classify bump style stock equipped rifles as machine guns, thereby forcing current owners to surrender or destroy them without compensation upon penalty of death or incarceration. Please take a minute out of your day and submit a comment here in opposition of this proposal. (https://www.regulations.gov/comment?D=ATF-2018-0002-0001)
To whom it may concern,
I am a professional educator and seek to spread knowledge in combat of ignorance. Lawmaking in our republic is a matter of deciding what is best for our society, not in implementing what some people like or dislike, want or not want. Our responsibility is to use logic and data, rather than opinion and ignorance, to support our decision making. Bump fire type devices have been in production for decades before they came into the spotlight when a resourceful sociopath used one to fire upon the crowd in Las Vegas last October. In those decades, thousands of lawful owners have used them harmlessly, so you must understand that this one incident is a statistical outlier. It is our duty to formulate policy based upon how it affects the greater society, not how it affects the sub one percent deviant population.
As a trained sniper, I will attest that normal semi automatic fire could have just as easily resulted in the same 500+ wounded, 50+ fatalities. In fact, it may be fortunate that the attacker was an amateur with firearms and did not aim his shots at the 20,000+ concert goers below. It is rather a miracle that of so many vulnerable and exposed innocent people below, the shooter only managed to kill .27% of them in his attack.
As evidenced in Charles Whitman’s attack on University of Texas Austin in 1966, a bolt action deer hunting rifle is at once nearly impossible to ban and perfectly deadly in the hands of the motivated. Tools are not the problem at hand.
I urge you to exercise Common Sense, that is to not blame the novelty gadget that a bump fire stock is for the actions of one individual. Do not waste our national resources, and your time on legislation that amounts to nothing.
You see, unlike true machine guns, bump fire is quite useless. It is only good for wasting ammunition and “shits and giggles”. Anyone who has shot a rifle in bump fire will attest to two things: That it is nearly impossible to aim, and that the action of bump fire can be done without the assistance of a special stock.
If you make bump fire stocks illegal, it neither stops sociopaths from killing the innocent using other means, nor does it stop people from being able to bump fire a normal semi automatic rifle. What exactly then are you accomplishing, other than wasting time and energy? The answer is, converting thousand of well intentioned, law abiding Americans into felons.
For every legislation, there is a cost. If the gain is meaningful, the the cost can be considered. In this case, the gain is nothing, and the cost to the american public is tremendous. Please considering this logic in your rule-making.
Thank you for your effort to read my letter.
Brian Wang