The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit on Thursday dismissed a challenge to the federal ban on bump stocks, which are designed to help make semi-automatic firearms behave more like fully automatic ones.
When attached to a semi-automatic firearm, a bump stock uses the weapon’s recoil energy after a shot is fired to “bump” the trigger back and forth against the shooter’s stationary finger, increasing the rate of fire. In October 2017, a gunman using semiautomatic rifles with bump stocks killed 58 people in Las Vegas, prompting the Trump administration to impose the following year a ban on those devices.
