Editor: Pity the poor bump stock. It is number one on the hit lists of both Trump and the gun grabbers. Even the NRA has little sympathy for the bump stock.

I had been reading books and magazines about firearms for going on 60 years, but until the shooting in Las Vegas, I had never heard of a bump stock.

I couldn’t understand how a semi-automatic could be made to mimic an automatic without altering the internal mechanism. And this newspaper, like all the others I read, had done next to nothing to enlighten me.

To the rescue came volume 72, issue 5 (March 2018) of Firearms News. Beginning on page 48 was a James Tarr product review of a commercially available bump stock. The review delivered more than I could absorb about the intricacies of bump stocks.

Tarr concluded his review:

I consider Slide Fire stocks to be absolutely cool toys that give you the real full-auto-like experience without needing any federal paperwork. They work exactly as advertised and allow you to fire semi-auto at true full-auto speeds. However, as for any tactical utility, in my opinion, they don’t really have any. … I don’t see how they could be superior to a standard trigger/stock system.”

In a sidebar to the main article, Vin Suprynowicz wrote that some experts contend that the Las Vegas shooter might have killed more people if he had taken single, aimed shots.

Bump stocks save lives. Why does everybody want to ban them?

Barney W. Hill