Bumpfire Ban couldn't have stopped Las Vegas

Scant few weeks from now, we'll all be sitting around the Thanksgiving dinner table, and I guarantee you someone will voice ignorant support for the proposed bumpfire stock bans. Don't get me wrong, I still think they're a stupid idea, but banning them would not have stopped the shooter (whose name I won't mention, so as to deprive him any further notoriety). Here's why:

1) Fully automatic machine guns are perfectly legal and readily available. The shooter could have bought real machine guns for the price of one night of heedless gambling. He went out and dropped six figures at the tables in a single weekend. That would buy 3-4 fully automatic AR or AK pattern rifles. Those real full autos would have been more reliable, more accurate, and had a higher rate of fire than the bumpfire stocks that he used.

He could also have bought a full size machine gun instead, and dropped only 50-60k and not needed backups because he wouldn't have overheated it.

2) Full auto conversions, though illegal, are rather simple. Most modern rifles were initially designed to be select fire. Semi-auto only variants sold to the general public are easily converted to fully automatic. It is even easier if one does not care about losing semi-auto option in the process.

In fact, it isn't all that difficult to work up full-auto-only conversions for guns that were never designed for auto to begin with, like the SKS and Mini. The ATF is often ridiculed for the things thay it considers "machine guns," but the fact if the matter is that it is often not difficult to make a machine gun out of a semi-auto. In fact, the British Home Guard had full auto conversion retrofits for the bolt-action Lee Enfield that were used as lightweight anti-aircraft guns in WWII.

3) Bump fire stocks are easy to make. Not as easy as instant ramen, maybe, but a lot easier than manunother things that hobbyists are known to make at home. A criminal could easily make a bump fire stock if he didn't have the time, patience, machinery, or knowledge to make a full auto conversion.

4) Accelerator stocks are just as easy, if not easier, to make than bump fire stocks. The Atkins Accelerator was a bumpfire stock that had a spring inside to provide the return pressure. Makeshift versions of this once-legal, now reinterpreted as illegal, stock can be as simple as adding weak compression springs to a butt-pad and a captive sliding forend.

5) The black market in guns from Latin America can provide full autos for a price. Similar black markets could easily provide bump fire stocks, though there wouldn't be a point if real full auto can be had.

So, basically, the state and federal governments can outlaw bump stocks all they like, but it would not have, and will not in the future, stop any shooting like the recent one in Las Vegas.

So I tried these explanations out today. I was met with the predicted, "Well, we have to do SOMETHING," followed by trailing off and a change of subject. There is no comeback.

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Bumpfire Ban couldn't have stopped Las Vegas