I was baffled when Trump made this executive order to ban bump stocks because I knew he and his sons were solidly 2A. The author of the post below is right that the NRA made little effort to oppose it. The post from a LinkedIn connection, Seán P. Fay, CEM, CHEP, now makes sense to me.
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Here’s one to ponder: SCOTUS striking down President Trump’s Executive Order banning bump stocks.
President Trump may be brash and say outlandish things, but he does understand the Constitution… and he has always been solidly pro-2nd Amendment. So why would he have issued an Executive Order directing the ATF to issue a regulation redefining bump stocks as machine guns? Since Congress had already defined machine guns as a matter of law, he HAD to know the ATF didn’t have the authority to rewrite the law.
Why issue the Order if he knew it was an unconstitutional regulation and doomed to eventual failure? Wouldn’t he avoid the political humiliation of creating a situation like that, to say nothing of alienating his pro-2nd Amendment political base?
It is my personal belief that President Trump issued an Executive Order banning bump stocks in order to PROTECT the 2nd Amendment in the United States.
Immediately after the Las Vegas shooting, there was an outcry to ban bump stocks and all kinds of other things, not even involved in the crime. (This is typical of gun banning efforts: the UK banned private ownership of rifles following a mass shooting with a pistol.)
In the aftermath of the Las Vegas Massacre, there was sufficient political will to force through a bill banning bump stocks. However, anyone who has been around the firearms industry for more than 15 minutes is fully aware that gun-banners would add dozens of other firearms and types of technology (again, unrelated to this crime) to the ban. By issuing an Executive Order, President Trump short-circuited nascent Congressional efforts to create a bill banning bump stocks (and everything else that would have been banned), with the full understanding that, eventually this unconstitutional executive order would be overturned. At that point, bump stocks would be legal again.
At the time of the shooting, there were sufficient Congressional votes to override a Presidential veto—even if he were inclined to issue one in the face of greatly outraged public opinion. Today, there is NOT the political will to push through such a bill. Thus, bump stocks—and everything else in the firearms industry that was in danger of being banned—have been preserved.
At the time he issued the order, I stated that this was his ultimate intent. I was further convinced of this when the NRA didn’t mount real opposition to the order. There must have been a reason they were quiet.
TLDR: By creating a regulation that he KNEW would be temporary – and eventually overturned – President Trump found the “least bad” method to protect the 2nd and 4th Amendment Constitutional rights of Americans.
