President Trump announced Tuesday that he is directing the Justice Department to propose a ban for bump stock firearm modifications, which he said "turn legal weapons into machine guns." Bump stocks were a hot topic of debate after the Las Vegas shooting on Oct. 1, 2017, in which the modification — which essentially makes semiautomatic firearms operate as though they were fully automatic — was used to kill 58 people and injure hundreds of others.
Trump's order comes the week after the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida, where 17 people were killed by a teenager with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle. The shooter, Nikolas Cruz, did not appear to use a bump stock during his rampage, the Miami Herald reports:
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