'Bump fire' devices turn rifles into machine guns: How is that legal?

One legal device turns regular semi-automatic rifles into rapid-fire weapons.?Guns can't be mechanically customized to spray-fire, but a device that simply aids the shooter's own firing action remains legal.

By Patrik Jonsson,?Staff writer / February 3, 2013

John Jackson, co-owner of Capitol City Arms Supply in Springfield, Ill., with an AR-15 rifle. An inexpensive device allows such weapons to spray-fire like a machine gun.

Seth Perlman/AP

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The heated public debate over gun control can hardly be described as nuanced. Yet one perfectly legal product that turns a regular rifle into a machine gun highlights how it's often the fine print that defines not only what kind of guns Americans can own, but how they're allowed to work, and how they can be used.

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A defense of assault-style rifles like the AR-15 used in the Sandy Hook massacre is that they're basically just semi-automatic rifles with cosmetic improvements. In other words, each bullet needs an individual trigger pull in order to explode out of the barrel. Actual spray-trigger machine guns, after all, have been illegal on the civilian market since 1986.

But debate around so-called "bump fire" devices that "simulate" automatic fire by utilizing a rifle's recoil to shoot the next bullet have caused some to wonder whether the devices could inspire a bureaucratic reclassification of assault weapons into machine guns, which in turn could lead to a de facto ban without Congress getting involved. That question may be politically sharper now, especially since an all-out assaults weapon ban, according to University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato, is "dead in the water."

"If the ATF wants to now come and ban [bump fire devices], they basically have to modify the definition of a machine gun," Jeremy Cottle, an Iraq War veteran and inventor of the Slide Fire stock, told the Guns America blog.

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On sale at the Lawrenceville, Ga., Gun Show last weekend, one such "bump fire" device is known to shake poorly-built rifles apart from the racket they make. A video accompanying the small metal trigger device showed an assault-style rifle pumping out dozens of rounds in seconds. It retailed for $49.95.

To be sure, the ATF has been paying close attention to the devices, and have delineated a narrow line of legality based, in essence, on mechanics versus physics.

Assault-style weapons can't be mechanically customized to spray-fire, but a non-mechanical device that simply aids the shooter's own firing action remains on this side of legal, according to ATF.

In 2005, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Enforcement rescinded a "letter of legality" given to one such device, the Akins Accelerator, mostly because the actual product didn't match the model sent to the ATF for approval.

But the problem also arose from a mechanical spring used in the original Akins. The product, spring-less, is now on sale again, certified by ATF.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/sWl2z45w81s/Bump-fire-devices-turn-rifles-into-machine-guns-How-is-that-legal

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