UNITED STATES
Gun bump stock ban under threat five years after Las Vegas mass killing
In 2017 Stephen Paddock rained bullets from a hotel window onto the crowd below at a country music festival in Las Vegas, killing 58 people and injuring hundreds before killing himself. The subsequent federal ban placed on gun bump stocks is now in jeopardy.
NBC news described the mass shooting as the deadliest such incident in modern American history.
Paddock was found to have fired more than 1,100 rounds of ammunition in about 11 minutes, employing semi-automatic rifles modified with the bump stocks. The devices enable semiautomatic rifles to fire faster, almost like machine guns. In 2019 the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the 2017 ban on the devices, but a divided Sixth Circuit court ruled in Mar 2021 that the ban is likely unlawful and must be put on hold.
Numerous gun control proposals have been thwarted in the U.S. Congress, largely because of opposition from Republican lawmakers and the influential National Rifle Association gun rights lobby.
The Gun Violence Archive defines a mass shooting as when four or more people have been shot or killed, not including the shooter.
