On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that it would take an act of Congress, not a Trump-era regulatory rule, to ban bump stocks for firearms.
Monday afternoon, New Mexico’s U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, joined by Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.), announced that they had organized nearly two dozen co-sponsors around quick action to do just that.
By Tuesday afternoon, the bill was dead. At least for now.
Heinrich and his co-sponsors had pushed the Banning Unlawful Machinegun Parts (BUMP) Act, which is designed to prohibit the sale of bump stocks and other devices that allow semiautomatic firearms to increase their rate of fire and effectively operate as fully automatic weapons. A similar bill sponsored by Rep. Dina Titus (D-Nev.) was also recently filed in the U.S. House of Representatives and had gained 145 co-sponsors by Tuesday, although there is little chance of it passing the Republican-led chamber in an election year.