Jan 14, 2014 CNNMoney's Aaron Smith shoots a few full automatic firearms, intended for law enforcement and the military, at the SHOT show Media Day at the Range in Boulder City, Nevada.
We don’t yet know for certain if Stephen Paddock used an automatic weapon when he killed at least 59 people, including himself, and injured hundreds of others in Las Vegas on Sunday night. If you know anything about US gun laws, though, this should have at first seemed unlikely — after all, automatic weapons are some of the few guns that are.The reality is more complicated. That’s because, as is all too typical with US gun laws, the automatic weapons ban has some pretty big loopholes. And that makes it possible that the rapid fire heard in the of the Las Vegas shooting came from a fully or effectively automatic weapon.Automatic weapons are what many Americans think of as machine guns.
These are guns that can continuously fire off a stream of bullets by simply holding down the trigger — making them very deadly. Semiautomatic weapons, by contrast, fire a single bullet per trigger pull. The difference between an automatic and a semiautomatic effectively translates to firing hundreds of rounds a minute versus dozens or so in the same time frame.Under federal law, fully automatic weapons are only if made before 1986, when Congress passed the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act. So it’s now illegal to manufacture new automatic weapons for civilian use.That gets us to the first loophole: If you have an automatic weapon from before 1986, it was grandfathered through the law. “Converting a semi-automatic to fully automatic is very, very easy,” John Sullivan, lead engineer for the gun access group Defense Distributed,. “At the end of the day, machine guns are easy to make.”Like other loopholes in gun laws, these have been in large part buttressed by argument that people should have these weapons to be able to defend themselves and their families. But the suggests that owning a gun actually increases the risk of death.Congress could close the loopholes, but it's unclear if they will.
3 Republican in the Senate, at least, did not rule it out. “To turn semiautomatic weapons into virtually automatic weapons, you know, that’s something I think we’ll take a look at,” Sen.
John Thune (R-SD) on Tuesday.There is good reason for skepticism. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) in 2013 proposed a bill banning bump stocks and similar modifications after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
But, as Kohrman reported, it never even got a vote in Congress.Until Congress changes the law, there are some pretty big legal loopholes letting Americans obtain weapons that are effectively automatic.For more on America’s gun laws and how they differ from other nations’ laws, read.Correction: Clarified the difference between automatic and semiautomatic weapons.