March 20, 2018 09:47 AM UTC

Senate Republicans Talk Selves Out of Banning Bump Stocks

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• by: Colorado Pols

As the Pueblo Chieftain’s Peter Roper reports, the widening gulf between politicians beholden to the National Rifle Association and still more radical gun-rights groups like the local Rocky Mountain Gun Owners, and the rest of America increasingly demanding action to reduce the death toll in mass shootings was on full display yesterday in the Colorado Senate State Affairs Committee:

A proposed ban on bump stocks that make semi-automatic rifles shoot like machine guns was rejected by Republicans on a state Senate committee Monday after hours of emotional testimony.

The measure, Senate Bill 51, was one of many drafted nationally after the mass shooting in Las Vegas last year in which the killer used bump stocks on a dozen AR-15 rifles to fire more than 1,100 rounds at a concert audience, killing 51 and wounding more than 420…

Sen. Owen Hill, R-El Paso County, seemed to speak for Republicans on the panel in saying the issue boiled down to each lawmaker’s philosophy of government.

“Government can rarely make a big impact on these issues,” he said. “Freedom is the side I come down on today.”

He was joined by GOP Sens Vickie Marbles [sic-Pols] of Fort Collins and Jerry Sonnenberg of Sterling in rejecting the bill. Hill was the only Republican to explain his vote.

Most Americans had never even heard of “bump stocks” before the Las Vegas mass shooting in October of last year. Simply described, a bump stock allows the bulk of a semiautomatic assault rifle to slide freely within the stock, and by resting one’s trigger finger on the bump stock allows the gun’s recoil to operate the trigger at a far faster rate of fire than one can achieve pulling the trigger conventionally. While not quite matching the rate of fire of a fully-automatic machine gun, the multiple bump stocks used by the Las Vegas shooter are what enabled him to kill and wound an unprecedented number of concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest music festival.

Just after the Las Vegas shooting, Dudley Brown of Rocky Mountain Gun Owners referred to bump stocks dismissively as a “poor man’s machine gun,” and opposed banning them for the usual boilerplate reasons gun nuts offer against any restrictions whatsoever on gun ownership. This is another opportunity to remind our readers that Dudley Brown, who holds sway over a large number of Republican lawmakers in the Colorado General Assembly, has a literalist view of gun rights that rejects gun regulation including the type of firearm or disqualifying criminal records. Brown claimed that most people who own bump stocks “just want to go to a range and try to see what automatic fire sounds like.”

As you can imagine, a survivor of the Las Vegas shooting would feel differently about that sound.

Back in reality, a ban on bump stocks is so overwhelmingly popular that even President Donald Trump has paid lip service to doing it. Support in public polling for banning bump stocks has been consistent at around 80% since the Las Vegas shooting. Despite this, Republicans in Colorado are accustomed to not paying any political price for stonewalling on guns, and if anything are still feeling arrogant empowered from the 2013 recalls.

With this vote, Democrats have been given powerful ammunition–to help relieve the Senate GOP of their majority.