edward said:
AR 15's fitted with slide stocks (for safety purposes ) were not banned.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1WhhKH3QVU&feature=pyv&ad=6832211627&kw=slidefire
Neither were shotguns with slide stocks.
That bump firing IMO should be illegal. I am all about the Second Amendment and yes I know it isn't just about hunting, but automatic fire weapons are supposed to be illegal and gun enthusiasts have to do a lot of educating to people who don't otherwise know that you cannot just go and buy an assault rifle (automatic fire rifle). You cannot just easily convert a semi-automatic gun into an automatic fire gun either, as they have to be built according to specific regulations from the BATFE that make them difficult to convert. Any semi-automatic weapon that can be easily converted to automatic-fire is considered an automatic-fire weapon. To own an automatic fire weapon, you can own one so long as it is registered pre-1986, but ownership is a privilege, as machine guns (which includes assault rifles) is not covered under the definition of the word "arms" in the Second Amendment. You also have to go through fingerprinting, a background check, ATF approval, six to nine month waiting period, etc...plus buying one will set you back about $10K to $20K as they're rare.
Bump firing gets around all of the above because they have a way to take a semi-automatic gun and make it where you can essentially do the equivalent of pull the trigger very rapidly. "Technically," it's not automatic fire as automatic fire means you pull the trigger once and it fires continuously, whereas this requires multiple trigger pulls but does them very rapidly, but in terms of being a weapon that can fire off rounds in rapid-succession, it most certainly is that. This could bring all manner of hell on the firearms community if some nut like a James Holmes gets a hold of one of these.
"Arms" in the Second Amendment is defined as "weapons ordinary law-abiding citizens would be expected to muster to militia conscription with." So things like handguns, shotguns, and semi-automatic rifles. Machine guns (which fire rifle rounds continuously), which includes assault rifles and sub-machine guns (guns that fire pistol rounds on full-auto), bombs, battle tanks, attack helicopters, nuclear bombs, etc...all that kind of stuff is not covered under the word arms.
The definition seeks a balance as when the Founders wrote the Second Amendment, it wasn't about hunting, it was about citizens being able to be armed, with military weapons, to resist a tyrannical government. The problem is that back then, military weapons were muskets and cannon at the most. Today, military weapons can be anything from a rifle to weaponized smallpox. The gun-control community has said that the Second Amendment thus shouldn't cover any modern weapons, but that goes too far, as by that logic, one could argue that the 1st Amendment doesn't cover any modern communications medium.
So the modern definition of basically handguns, shotguns, and semi-auto rifles is the happy balance as those are the arms you'd expect people to show up with when forming a militia. Bump-firing isn't technically, mechanically, a machine gun, but it simulates it, and that could be very bad for the Second Amendment in the future.
