President Trump announced on Tuesday that he’s planning to outlaw bump stock devices, which can turn a semi-automatic firearm into an automatic weapon.
The president made the announcement at the White House Medal of Valor ceremony, according to a report by DailyMail. The development comes less than a week after the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Videos by PopCulture.com
“I signed a memorandum directing the Attorney General to propose regulations to ban all devices that turn legal weapons into machine guns,” President Trump told those at the ceremony.
A bump stock device was used in the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas last year, though it was not used in Parkland last Wednesday. However, Nikolas Cruz, the confessed gunman from last week’s event, did use an AR-15 assault rifle — the same one used by Stephen Paddock in Las Vegas and many other mass shooters in the last several years.
The White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, noted in her briefing that the president hasn’t ruled out new gun control policies, including an assault weapons ban. The policies are extremely unpopular with President Trump’s base. The AR-15 was among the weapons banned in the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, until the law expired in 2004. Lawmakers chose at the time not to renew it.
A renewal of that law is one of the key goals of activists, including many of the survivors of last week’s shooting. Students from Stoneman Douglas High have travelled to Tallahassee to lobby for tighter restrictions on assault weapons, and they’re planning a march on Washington at the end of next month in collaboration with the Women’s March.
In addition, high school students across the country are participating in a walk-out on April 20, the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre.
