A bump stock ban is needed

The argument

On October 1st, 2017, Stephen Paddock committed a mass shooting at a country music festival in Las Vegas, using a bump stock mechanism. The device is the specific object of this argument, and the reasoning turns on what it changed about that night rather than on gun ownership in general. A bump stock allows a weapon to be fired far faster than it otherwise could be. Fired into a crowd, rate of fire translates directly into casualties, because the number of people a shooter can hit is a function of how many rounds they can put into a dense mass of bodies before being stopped. Paddock was firing into a festival audience, and the interval that mattered was the time it took armed units to locate and reach him. Without access to a bump stock he would not have been able to kill anywhere near as many people within that interval. The same attack, from the same position, against the same response time, but at a lower rate of fire, would have produced a smaller death toll. That counterfactual is what makes the case narrow and strong. It requires no claim about who should own firearms or why; it requires only the observation that a particular accessory raised the lethality of an attack that actually occurred, and that removing it would have lowered the number of people killed. Whatever recreational value the device holds, it is slight beside the difference it makes when used this way, and that difference is measured in lives. Banning bump stocks would therefore reduce the loss of life in mass shootings at negligible cost to anything else. A bump stock ban is needed, and the case shows why gun ownership should be controlled.

Context

Bump stocks are essentially a "horizontal pogo stick" which allows users to shoot a semi-automatic weapon like an automatic weapon by bouncing the trigger off a stationary finger to replicate a rapid-fire mechanism. It allows shooters to fire many more rounds per minute.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Banning bump stocks will have almost no effect on the lethality or frequency of mass shootings in America. Firstly, they are not even that functional. They often lead to the weapon jamming or misfiring, and significantly reduce the accuracy of the weapon. In fact, not using a bump stock would probably lead to more deaths in the event of a mass shooting. Secondly, if someone has decided to kill a lot of people in a mass shooting, the lack of availability of bump stocks will not change their mind. There will be just as many mass shootings, involving just as many killers, who will kill exactly the same number of victims, if not more.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Banning bump stocks would not mitigate the loss of life in mass shooting incidents.

Framing

- The state has the right to mitigate access to things that could be harmful.

Further reading

William Tyler Gilbert, Calling a Spade, A Spade: Infirmities Facing Bump Stock Regulation under the National Firearms Act, 107 Ky. L.J. 705 (2019).