JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) -The debate continues about what residents can legally have when it comes to modifications to guns.
3 on your side looks at whether the latest Supreme Court ruling conflicts with any state laws, including one set to take effect on July 1.
A federal ban on bump stocks took effect in 2018. It was in response to the mass shooting at a Las Vegas music festival the previous year. The ATF regulation classified guns with bump stocks as machine guns. That ban was struck down by the United States Supreme Court last week.
“Because there aren’t any Second Amendment issues, because in this instance, given the federal failure to regulate, there aren’t any preemption issues, the states can go ahead and do what they want,” explained Christopher Green, Jamie L. Whitten Chair in Law & Government at the University of Mississippi School of Law.
Mississippi lawmakers just passed legislation criminalizing the manufacture, possession and use of “machine gun conversion devices.”
The question then is whether that impacts bump stocks. Sen. Joey Fillingane was on the conference committee that worked out the details of the bill’s language that they say was specifically targeting Glock switches.
“Basically, the distinction is, when you pull the trigger one time if more than one shot is fired with just the single pull, then that is what we outlaw. That’s considered a machine gun,” explained Fillingane.
That language was worked out with the help of the National Rifle Association.
“They worked very closely with us in drafting the language and they would have been very concerned had we been expansive enough to have prohibited bump stocks,” added Fillingane. “That was a discussion that we were having in an ongoing way.”
Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America were pleased to see Glock switches banned but add this.
“They should have made it more expansive,” noted Patricia Ice, Be SMART Lead for the Jackson chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. “Because, as you know, we have a lot of gun violence here in Jackson and all over the state. We are trying to do everything that we can [to] prevent gun violence. So any legislation that we can come up with here in Mississippi that will help reach an objective, that’s what we want to see.”
Congress is looking at the bump stock issue after the Supreme Court decision. But the legislation to ban the devices was blocked in the U-S Senate Wednesday.
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