LAS VEGAS WRAL — The gunman who unleashed hundreds of rounds of gunfire on a crowd of concertgoers in Las Vegas had two “bump-stocks” that could have converted semi-automatic firearms into fully automatic ones, officials said.
The devices have attracted scrutiny in recent years from authorities.
California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has long railed against them. Several years ago, she told The Associated Press she was concerned about the emergence of new technologies that could retrofit firearms to make them fully automatic.
“This replacement shoulder stock turns a semi-automatic rifle into a weapon that can fire at a rate of 400 to 800 rounds per minute,” she said.
Along with the 23 guns that police officers found in Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock’s Mandalay Bay hotel room, officials also found two “bump stocks.” These devices, which are legal, use a semi-automatic weapon’s recoil to allow it to fire repeatedly at a rate closer to that of a fully-automatic weapon.
Two of the main manufacturers of bump stocks —Bump Fire Systems and Slide Fire—have posted letters from the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which declare these devices as legal in large part because they “[have] no automatically functioning mechanical parts or springs and [perform] no automatic function when installed.”