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Tribune News Service
Tribune News Service
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Daily News Editorial Board

Editorial: A step in a marathon: The Trump administration bans bump stocks

Tuesday, President Donald Trump, who hasn't shown the slightest inclination to nudge his party toward passing universal background checks, or banning assault rifles or high-capacity magazines, made good on a promise to prohibit bump stocks.

Those are the disgusting attachments, used in a 2017 Las Vegas massacre that took 59 lives, that enable semi-automatic rifles to fire continuously with a single trigger pull.

Under just-released administration guidelines, they'll be verboten 90 days hence under the same federal law that prohibits machine guns.

To recap: It took 443 days to ban an accessory that enables legal assault rifles to be turned into even more industrially efficient death murder machines capable of firing at a rate of up to 800 rounds a minute, reversing an idiotic decision by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that they didn't amount to machine guns and therefore couldn't be curbed without a new law.

And we have to pocket this as progress in a country in total thrall to the gun.

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