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Jim Hoft Flat Out Lies About Panetta and "Waterboarding," Gets a Drudge Link

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Kragar2/03/2013 12:56:35 pm PST

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

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.