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Jeff Sessions just announced his plan to ban bump stocks

Sessions proposed legally recognizing “bump stocks” as “machine guns” on Friday.

Nearly a month after President Donald Trump ordered his attorney general to ban bump stocks, Jeff Sessions has finally announced a plan to follow through on that promise.

Sessions proposed legally recognizing “bump stocks” as “machine guns” on Friday. Since most machine guns are illegal in the United States, the change would effectively ban bump stocks, which channel semi-automatic firearms’ recoil into rapid fire, allowing them to spew bullets like automatic weapons.

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“Since the day he took office, President Trump has had no higher priority than the safety of each and every American,” Sessions said in a statement. “After the senseless attack in Las Vegas, this proposed rule is a critical step in our effort to reduce the threat of gun violence that is in keeping with the Constitution and the laws passed by Congress.”

The call to ban bump stocks first broke out last October, after a gunman mutated his semi-automatic assault-style weapon with a fitted a bump stock and used it to kill at least 58 people at a Las Vegas concert last year. Trump, however, didn’t call for a ban on the accessories until Feb. 20, after the shooting in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people. (The gunman in that massacre didn’t use a bump stock.)

Trump celebrated Sessions’ announcement on Twitter. “We will BAN all devices that turn legal weapons into illegal machine guns,” he wrote. Banning the accessories is also a move that National Rifle Association (NRA) supports.

Trump’s tweet also accused the Obama administration of legalizing bump stocks, which is untrue. Instead, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) sent a letter in 2013 to Congress outlining that the agency had determined that bump stocks don’t fit the legal definition of a “machine gun” and thus, couldn’t be unilaterally banned under federal statutes.

Reversing that determination and giving the ATF the power to restrict bump stocks won’t be easy for Trump and Sessions, despite the Friday announcement. As California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein pointed out in a February statement, “If ATF tries to ban these devices after admitting repeatedly that it lacks the authority to do so, that process could be tied up in court for years, and that would mean bump stocks would continue to be sold. Legislation is the only answer.”

Sessions’ proposal also won’t go into effect immediately. Once his amendment is published in the Federal Register, civilians will be able to comment on it for 90 days.

Cover image: Washington Rick Wyant, supervisor of the forensic firearms unit at the Washington State Patrol crime laboratory in Seattle, test fires a semi-automatic rifle that has been fitted with a so-called bump stock device to make it fire faster on Jan. 11, 2018 photo. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)