The US government said Tuesday it was banning bump stocks, devices that allow semi-automatic weapons to fire like machine guns and that were used in a mass shooting in Las Vegas in October 2017. The devices, which harness the recoil of a semi-automatic rifle’s discharge to make the trigger fire faster, effectively turn the weapons into machine guns, which are illegal, the Justice Department said. Bump stocks allow a “shooter of a semi-automatic firearm to initiate a continuous firing cycle with a single pull of the trigger,” the department said in a statement.
