Las Vegas shooting survivors alarmed at US Supreme Court's strike down of ban on rifle bump stocks
Survivors of the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas and families who received somber calls hours later said they were alarmed when the U.S. Supreme Court Friday struck down a ban on the gun attachment used by the gunman who rattled off over 1,000 bullets in 11 minutes. The Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a rapid-fire accessory that allows a rate of fire comparable to that of machine guns, was nixed in a 6-3 majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas, who authored the opinion, wrote that the Justice Department was wrong in declaring that bump stocks transformed semiautomatic rifles into illegal machines guns because they don’t “alter the basic mechanics of firing.”
